Challenge Three: ‘Taming Katrinas’:
Controlling the weather patterns
By Dr Daniel Coca
Over the past decade, tens of hurricanes have battered the Atlantic and Pacific coasts wreaking havoc upon the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.
Everybody remembers Katrina, the costliest and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the history of the US. Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Dolly, Eduoard, Fey and Hanna are just few of the hurricanes that have visited us in 2008 and scientists predict more stormy seasons to come.
Increasingly scientists are looking for ways to prevent the formation of powerful storms. Active weather modification is in fact a long-established research area with weather modification experiments going back as far as the 1900’s. Most recently, cloud seeding methods were used before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Other weather modification methods using radiowaves and lasers for ionospheric stimulation have been attempted or are currently being implemented.
For control engineers this area of research offers many challenges. The current weather ‘actuation’ methods are still poorly understood. Models are required to describe the effects of anthropomorphic factors on the global climate. Methods for finding the optimal locations of sensors and actuators will have to be developed.
New controller design and optimization techniques will have to be developed to ‘manipulate’ effectively such a complex, multiscale, stochastic system.
A grand challenge for control engineers over the next decade is to demonstrate the feasibility to control effectively the weather (i.e. disrupt formation of powerful storms, avoid serious droughts and even mitigate the effect of greenhouse gases) using computer simulations involving the most complete and accurate Global Climate Models available.