Continuing

In the Spring of 2002, I went out of my way to try to discuss these matters with the NHC (National Hurricane Center) and related government Agencies, primarily in Florida but also in Colorado, Texas and elsewhere, but they seemed to uninterested in the fact that I am a Physicist and instead simply assumed that hurricanes are too large and too powerful for humans to affect. I believe they may be wrong about that, along the lines of the shattering wineglass mentioned below! However, even if their assumption is right, that we humans are just to puny to affect a hurricane, doesn't it seem at least logical to TRY some fairly simple and inexpensive experiments, in the remote chance it might work?
It has been immensely frustrating to me to watch as terribly destructive hurricanes such as Katrina in 2005 have done such massive damage, where I think there might actually have been a (remote?) possibility of degrading such hurricanes far before they had ever approached land. Had I somehow been more persuasive in getting government personnel to have interest in my concept, who knows whether Katrina might even have ever existed? But in my attempts at dozens of visits and interviews in the Spring of 2002, only a single individual was even willing to spend a few minutes to listen to me (after I had spent a week of my time in trying to provide this information to them!) He was extremely interested and extremely impressed, and he even mentioned that he thought it might have a chance of working. He then mentioned to me a number of rather hare-brained ideas that their Agencies had previously tried, such as flying cargo aircraft filled with many tons of bags of concrete through the Eye of a hurricane and dumping them, in an apparent attempt at paving over the ocean inside the Eye! Unfortunately, he ended the interview by mentioning that he was about to retire shortly and that he no longer had any pull around there. He promised me to try to get some of his colleagues to listen to my concept before he left, but that must not have ever had any effect, as no one ever later contacted me.
By the way, during that same trip in early 2002, I contacted a number of people in and near New Orleans, by phone and by e-mail, including the Mayor of New Orleans and several City Engineers, and also Joe Suhayda, a known researcher on hurricanes who had warned of danger to New Orleans due to hurricanes. None of those people even responded to any of my phone calls or letters. But I had then (more than three years before Katrina) attempted to warn them of aspects of their situation where the Physics indicated great danger. Sadly, no one seemed to have any interest in my concerns then. I might note that when Katrina hit, it had degraded down to a Category 3 hurricane, and also that it had actually entirely MISSED hitting New Orleans! It amazes me that people who later decided to "revise history" portray Katrina as a tremendously damaging hurricane! It was nowhere near as strong as the hurricane Andrew that devastated Florida or a number of other giants. Had Katrina ACTUALLY remained at Category 5 (which it had earlier been) and ACTUALLY hit New Orleans, the devastation probably would have been far greater than what actually happened. But I guess all that is "politics" and "spin" where leaders keep insisting that New Orleans will be "rebuilt better than ever", essentially without any funding to actually do it. However, spending hundreds of billions of dollars more to rebuild that city would be very foolish, as between future, stronger hurricanes and rising sea levels, it may only be 20 years before New Orleans (currently 7 feet BELOW sea level and protected by those 117 miles of dikes) will be forever abandoned as being entirely underwater. My contact with New Orleans at that time was not actually regarding hurricanes, but when I realized that their situation, of slowly sinking into the recent sediment of a river delta, was very similar to the one where I was then attempting to provide a way for Venice Italy to actually physically RAISE their city by around five feet. In any case, hurricane research now really has no way to help them.
As indicated below, this basic concept regarding enabling hurricanes to become unstable and spontaneously degrade was developed by the beginning of 2001, but in early 2004, two new (simpler) mechanisms were recognized as possible to create the necessary shock waves in the perimeter of a hurricane. One would be a precise (due to GPS and precise clocks) repetition of a vertical stack of "percussion bombs" (OUTSIDE the perimeter of the hurricane) to create a vertical-source shock wave to disrupt the smooth circulation flow of the outer hurricane winds. The other is the sequential use of several supersonic aircraft a few miles outside the 50 mph winds of the outer circulation. The sonic boom caused by supersonic objects like aircraft or bullets is actually a shock wave propagating through the air. An aircraft with a nose cone angle of 10°, traveling at Mach 1.1, creates an extremely intense pressure shock wave, as much as 4 PSI, or 100" of barometric pressure, around 68° out away from the tail centerline. If a supersonic aircraft followed a very specific, fairly tight smooth level, logarithmic spiral turn, the resulting continuous shock waves become closer together in the air inward along the radius of the turn. It is possible to shape that logarithmic spiral path so that the sonic boom shock waves from as much as 45 seconds of the supersonic aircraft's flight can all be made to arrive at a desired location a few miles to the side at the same instant, creating an extremely intense (vertical line) shock wave at that single location. Depending on how precisely the aircraft could follow the logarithmic spiral path, an incredible sound intensity could be generated, mathematically around 220 decibels, quite possibly the loudest sound ever heard on Earth! This single wavefront of such extremely loud low-frequency sound exists as a compressed-air shock wave. By following that specific curved path, the natural 4 PSI pressure of a sonic boom shock wave might be increased to over 30 PSI, in that single planned target destination inside the periphery of the hurricane. The premise is that that instantaneous local pressure increase would compress and then expand the air at that location, suddenly creating new air motions at rather high velocities, which we might pre-design. If that were possible, then it might be possible to repeatedly (at a very specific interval to create a resonance) generate such localized air motions to try to disrupt the circulation motions of the hurricane. It is also possible for the aircraft to follow a course of slightly greater radius turn, or a possibly a horizontal somewhat hyperbolic path, to cause a broader (in time) shock wave to appear there, which has the effect of being at a lower frequency. This sudden blast of hurricane-radially-inward wind would act to drive some of the hurricane's winds farther inward, disrupting the normal circular flow, causing ripples to form in the circulation, and somewhat de-stabilizing the hurricane. Several such aircraft would be flown to create repetitive sonic boom disruptions in the same position in the hurricane, to try to inspire the wineglass-like self-destruction of the hurricane.
Every year, dozens of hurricanes (and Pacific typhoons, which are the same thing) do enormous damage in lives and property in several parts of the world. They are enormous, being many miles in diameter, and they have phenomenal amounts of energy and power. Over the years, many speculative concepts have been proposed to try to deal with them, but any such efforts would not be like David and Goliath, but a flea and Goliath. The most powerful machinery that we have fades into inconsequentiality in relation to the size and power of even a moderate hurricane. A "brute force" approach has NO chance of succeeding, even though some very creative and intriguing ideas have been presented and considered.
A very rough estimate of the amount of kinetic energy in a mature hurricane is around 1018 joules, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. As a comparison, if every one of the hundred million operating cars in America were run at absolutely full throttle, they all would have to run like that for about 20 hours straight to produce that much energy! That gives a rough idea why traditional methods of Engineering would have no noticeable effect on a hurricane, because of the enormous size and strength. All that energy cannot just be made to disappear, but must somehow be dissipated (converted to other forms of energy, primarily frictional heating of other air).
Current research into hurricanes seems to focus on the central areas, where the winds are highest, near the "eye". However, even superficial calculation shows that the majority of the actual kinetic energy contained in a hurricane resides in the huge outer areas. Even though the winds are slower there, the vast quantity of moving air carries most of the energy of movement. This fact has therefore encouraged this new approach at degrading a hurricane, by attempting to cause disruptions, destabilizations, in the perimeter of the storm, to cause energy to be dispersed there (probably as tornadoes spawned off).
This involves NO attempt to "over-power" the hurricane! Rather, it uses the energy that is already in the hurricane by encouraging some of that energy to get "out-of-phase" with the main circulation of the hurricane. This out-of-phase energy becomes disruptive, with the intended result to create many (small) tornadoes which remove kinetic energy from the main circulation of the hurricane.
It has long been noticed that, in the late stages of a hurricane's existence, many (brief) tornadoes often appear along their borders. Such tornadoes have extremely fast-moving winds, but their relatively small size means they contain only a fraction of the energy of a hurricane. They each therefore remove fairly large amounts of rotational energy from the hurricane in very short periods of time. These tornadoes are clearly a very energy-expensive aspect of hurricanes, and they are never seen early in the life of a hurricane. My interest is to try to use this existing natural phenomenon, but to artificially inspire it to occur much earlier in the life-sequence of a hurricane!
If this tornado-spawning process can be artificially induced, well before a hurricane approaches land, large amounts of the circulation energy should be removable from the hurricane by this process, and the hurricane would then necessarily be degraded in strength. No one could know or plan where the tornadoes might form or where they might go, so it would be critically important to do this process far from all land and human activities. However, the advantage is that tornadoes have very short lifetimes, and never travel very far before self-degrading due to frictional losses, where the main hurricane would have damage-creating potential for many days over a very large region.
It is believed that this effect of tornado-spawning once over land is a primary reason why many hurricanes degrade so very quickly when they are over land, because so much rotational energy is dissipated to the many tornadoes. The kinetic energy or rotation of the hurricane cannot just disappear, so it must be converted into other forms of energy, almost certainly being frictional heat energy in the air. This seems to imply that the air temperature must rise as a hurricane degrades. Beginning in 2002, technology has become capable of monitoring this data over the entire region of a hurricane, so this premise should soon be proven or disproven, assuming that someone decides to measure it!
The speculation here is that a hurricane that can be artificially caused to spawn hundreds of such tornadoes (while still over the ocean) might thereby quickly give up substantial amounts of its kinetic rotational energy to those tornadoes and the hurricane remaining would thereby rapidly get weaker. Once separated from the hurricane, each tornado would soon lose its kinetic energy by normal friction to the surrounding air. That two-stage process would therefore accomplish dissipating a great deal of energy rather quickly. This seems like a possibility worth looking into.
One way or another, when a hurricane disappears, all that kinetic energy of rotation must become converted into frictional heating of local air and ground. It has long been believed that friction with the ground is a major cause of the relatively rapid diminution of a hurricane's strength when over land. However, the resulting increase in that ground's temperature would be significant, due to the enormous amount of kinetic energy which must be dissipated. Clearly, the creation of peripheral tornadoes, which quickly dissipate and therefore give up their rotational kinetic energy into frictional heating of the air, must also represent a significant method of hurricane energy reduction.
This concept is here seen as a significant possibility regarding how to remove large amounts of energy from hurricanes, to inspire them to spontaneously spawn tornadoes earlier in their existence.
It seems prudent to try to deal with a hurricane well before it nears any land, out in the open ocean. For one thing, it then has less total kinetic energy of rotating winds to try to dissipate. We wish to (externally) cause small turbulences in the outer circulation of it, with the intent of encouraging it to form those tornadoes at that time. Being away from land and people, such tornadoes would not cause any damage, but they would collectively remove large amounts of kinetic energy from the hurricane circulation, thereby weakening it. The premise of this application is that if hundreds of such tornadoes could be artificially spawned from a hurricane, the remaining kinetic energy would be greatly reduced, either degrading or dissipating the hurricane.
There are several other possible applications of this concept, mentioned below, but this tornado-inducer might be the simplest of them.