What would happen if you lit off a high yield nuclear device in the eye of a hurricane?

Question

In the middle of the ocean (not over land). Would it be enough to disperse the storm? Would an Airburst or subsurface explosion be more helpful?

Answer 1

thats a cool idea, i believe that the hurricane would probably be quite disrupted, maybe even to the point of lowering its intensity substantially, but it seems that the fallout may be an issue, but thats only intuitive, it may actually not be an issue if you think about how many bombs we have tested

Answer 2

From NOAA:

"A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.

If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity's disposal is closer to the storm's, but the task of focusing even half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean would still be formidable. Brute force interference with hurricanes doesn't seem promising.

...

To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

Answer 3

The fallout would get sucked up by the storm and distributed throughout the atmosphere for all to breath. In fact your idea is probably the best way to give everyone on earth radiation poisoning.

Answer 4

You would have a larger, radioactive hurricane. Subsurface detonation increases the radioactivity by about 500 times.

Answer 5

you would spread radiation over a wide area