Explore the possibility to control hurricanes

Hurricanes, also known as tropical cyclones and typhoons, are the biggest and the most devastating storms on Earth. In this seminar, I will talk about the possibility to control hurricanes with existing human capability. Energetically speaking, controlling hurricanes is a very challenging task due to a large gap: hurricanes are gigantic heat engines with a power of around 10¹⁴ Watt, while the most powerful manmade engines have the power of only 10⁸ Watt. This six-order-magnitude gap is the major obstacle toward using existing engines to control hurricanes. To fill in this gap, we propose to utilize the chaotic nature of hurricanes, namely, the sensitivity of a chaotic system to its initial condition, to control hurricanes. In this presentation, I will first review the basics of hurricanes and existing chaos control methods, and then present my thoughts on hurricane control and preliminary results I acquired since joining Prediction Science Laboratory. Future directions on using reinforcement learning to control hurricanes will also be discussed. Since it is a very challenging task, I welcome any discussions, questions, and comments. I hope we can make the hurricane-risk-free future come earlier.