September 30, 2010 report
Plan to use submarines to subdue typhoons/hurricanes
(PhysOrg.com) -- A Japanese hydraulic manufacturing company has unveiled plans to use submarines to downgrade the force of typhoons. The company, Ise Kogyo, from Mie in Central Japan, has had patents approved in Japan and India for its geo-engineering plan to use submarines to subdue typhoons, which are known elsewhere in the world as hurricanes, tropical storms, cyclonic storms and cyclones.
The idea is to use a fleet of around 20 submarines in front of the gathering storm, each fitted with eight pumps capable of shooting 480 tonnes of cold water a minute. The submarines would dive to a depth of 30 meters and pump water from that depth onto the surface of the sea to lower the surface temperature.
Company executive Koichi Kitamura, who came up with the idea, said that in an hour a fleet of 20 submarines could lower the temperature of 57,000 square meters of surface water enough to diminish the strength of the typhoon, which needs an ocean temperature of 25 to 27 degrees Celsius to form and keep spinning. He said the scheme should be able to stop a typhoon in its tracks.
A patent application for the scheme is pending and may be approved soon in the US. The main problems in its implementation would seem to be accurately predicting the path of the storm and deploying enough submarines to exactly the right place in time.
These problems may prove insurmountable, and questions have also been raised on the advisability of preventing such storms anyway, since they provide a critical heat transport mechanism for transferring thermal energy around the globe.
Ise Kogyo is now reportedly seeking partners to help them test their ideas.
More information: via Mainichi
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