Q. Why can't a missile be exploded in the eye of a hurricane to break it up?

Roslindale

A. Great question, D.W. The answer will blow you away.

A hurricane gets its energy from the warm waters of the ocean. The water has to be at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit to get a hurricane going and keep it going.

Even before they've formed into the recognizable spinning pattern characteristic of hurricanes, tropical depressions are stirring up the ocean below them and drawing up heat from a depth of 200 feet -- over an area 300 miles in diameter. That is a huge amount of ocean, providing the growing storm with a fantastic amount of energy. By the time it gets going, a hurricane is a force of nature far stronger than anything we puny little humans can throw at it.

The numbers are astonishing. According to Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, the average hurricane is using energy at a rate of 3 trillion watts. . That's the same as the energy you'd need to light 30 billion one-hundred watt light bulbs simultaneously.

That happens to be nearly the same as the entire electrical generating capacity of every power plant on Earth.

A big hurricane like Mitch, which tore up the western Caribbean last week, could be even more powerful -- 3 times 10 to the thirteenth power. That's 30 trillion watts of energy per second! That's three times more than all the energy used by the entire human race for the year in 1990! In bomb terms, to blow up a hurricane, you'd have to match its explosive energy, equivalent to a one megaton bomb (83 Hiroshima atomic bombs-worth) every 20 minutes.

Why not bomb just the eye of the storm? That's where most of the power of the storm is.

Only about 10 percent of a hurricane's energy is converted into wind and spread out across the storm. The rest stays right near the eye, helping draw more heat up out of the ocean and sending it thousands of feet up into the storm.

That's what keeps a hurricane going. And that's why they die when they get over land. No heat means no hurricane.

Emanuel says, ``If you want to attack a hurricane you want to try to keep the storm from absorbing heat from the ocean. Then you might have a chance.''

He says one idea is spreading a layer of polymer, like a giant sheet of liquid plastic wrap, over the surface of the ocean below the storm. That would slow the evaporation of water where ocean and atmosphere meet, and the storm couldn't draw up heat from the ocean as efficiently. Heat is hurricane food. The storm would starve.

But he acknowledges there's little chance the polymer slick -- which would be like an oil slick, only non-polluting -- could hold together in the extreme conditions of the hurricane, because the storm is wildly churning the surface and stirring the water to depths of 200 feet.

``It's really another far-fetched idea. Just not quite as far-fetched as any of the others,'' Emanuel says.

How about breaking up storms when they're weaker, before they turn into hurricanes? Frank LePore of the National Hurricane Center says there are two problems with that idea. First, we don't know where to aim. And even if we did, the only bullets we've tried so far don't work.

There are 80 to 100 pre-hurricane storm systems each year in the eastern Atlantic off Africa. ``Only 6 percent turn into hurricanes,'' LePore says. ``We don't know which ones will, and which ones won't.''

They're immense, hundreds of miles wide and thousands of feet high. Finally, he says, ``they're not neatly spinning around yet. They're too diffuse to know where to aim. There is no easy target.''

Operation Storm Fury in the 1960's was a US government experiment to seed hurricane clouds with silver iodide crystals, to turn some of the thunderstorm clouds near the eye of the hurricane into rain clouds.

Turning moisture into rain uses energy and cools things off. Remember: No heat means no hurricane.

But the crystals didn't do the trick. It turns out things are too warm inside the hurricane to get cloud-seeding to work.