Why don we try to destroy tropical cyclones by adding a water absorbing substance ?
“Dyn-O-Gel” is a special powder (produced by Dyn-O-Mat) that absorbs large amounts of moisture and then becomes a gooey gel. Some have proposed dropping large amounts of the substance into the clouds of a hurricane to dissipate some of the clouds and help to weaken or destroy the hurricane. The makers of Dyn-O-Gel claim to have used the substance to dissipate clouds. At HRD we tested the one possible way that “Dyn-O-Gel” could weaken a hurricane in the MM5 numerical model. We saw an effect but it was small (~1 m/s). The argument was that the glop would make raindrops lumpy (i. e., non-aerodynamic) they would fall slower and increase condensate loading, thus weakening the eyewall updraft. If, by contrast, one increases the fall speed of the hydrometeors, the storm strengthens (again by only ~1 m/s). In the numerical experiments “decrease” meant reduce the fall velocity to half the real value, and “increase” meant double the real value. This effect is larger than anything one could hope
