Humans do not have the technology to manipulate hurricanes

Hurricanes Helene and Milton made the 2024 North Atlantic hurricane season a particularly destructive one. Helene and Milton made landfall at a politically sensitive time, with the high-tension US presidential election only a month after Milton struck Florida’s west coast. Against that backdrop, some commentators speculated that the hurricanes were being directed by the government or another unspecified party – potentially to disrupt voters and manipulate the election results.

Different claims offer different suggestions of how this manipulation would have been done. Some claim that radar facilities like HAARP and NEXRAD are manipulating the atmosphere. Others, such as Alex Jones, have dug up supposed lists of U.S. patents for supposed weather modification technology.

As we show in this insight, humans do not possess the capability to control hurricanes. This is not for lack of trying – humans have actively tried to modify the weather for decades, with uncertain results at best. In fact, humans have even tried to weaken hurricanes, with little success. Hurricanes are simply far too powerful for today’s weather modification attempts to manipulate. More fanciful claims about high-tech weather manipulation have no basis in reality.

Hurricanes are too powerful to be modified

The sheer power of a hurricane means that manipulating one is far, far easier said than done. It may be difficult to truly appreciate a hurricane’s power from far away when the hurricane appears as just a spiral on a weather map; a single hurricane can output more power than all the power grids in the world combined.

As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) explains:

“The energy released from a hurricane can be explained in two ways: the total amount of energy released by the condensation of water droplets (latent heat), or the amount of kinetic energy generated to maintain the strong, swirling winds of a hurricane. The vast majority of the latent heat released is used to drive the convection of a storm, but the total energy released from condensation is 200 times the world-wide electrical generating capacity, or 6.0 x 10¹⁴ [joules] per day.“

Or, to give the example of a specific hurricane: when Hurricane Andrew made landfall in South Florida in 1992, it emitted some 5,000 times more power than a mid-sized nuclear power plant, according to NOAA. Any claim that hurricanes are being manipulated – especially for hurricanes like Milton – suggests that storms this powerful can be corralled or even created from scratch. As we show below, while weather modification attempts are not uncommon today, the techniques that are used are nowhere near powerful enough to do this.

Today’s weather modification cannot modify hurricanes

Modern discussions about weather modification revolve around cloud seeding. Humans have long tried cloud seeding to increase rainfall in arid or drought-stricken areas; cloud seeding has also been used in attempts to increase snowfall (see Figure 1), to shrink hailstones, and to clear out air pollution. The science is unclear on whether cloud seeding is effective, but the science is clear that cloud seeding can’t manufacture or manipulate hurricanes.

Precipitation forms in clouds as water within it condenses into growing droplets of water or ice. Once these bits of water grow large enough, they fall out of the cloud as rain, or – if the weather at ground level is cold enough – as snow. Cloud seeding tries to accelerate the process by filling a cloud with small crystals – most often made from silver iodide, but occasionally from other chemicals like dry ice, potassium iodide, or even sodium chloride (table salt)^[1]. In theory, these crystal ‘seeds’ encourage raindrops or ice shards to grow around them. Cloud seeding doesn’t work on just any cloud – for it to have a chance to work, a cloud usually needs to contain supercooled water, liquid droplets that stay liquid below water’s usual freezing point of 0°C (32°F), which can happen if the droplets haven’t yet touched an ice crystal.

Humans have tried to use cloud seeding in its present form since at least the 1950s^[1]. Today, dozens of countries around the world, including China, India, Mexico, Thailand, the UAE, and the U.S., have active cloud seeding programs. 

The science on cloud seeding is unclear and suggests that cloud seeding – at best – can alter the weather in certain conditions and on a local scale. The science gives no indication that cloud seeding can create any kind of disaster, let alone large ones like Helene or Milton. According to one study that compared unseeded and seeded rainstorms in the northeastern UAE, seeded storms on average lasted 65% longer and covered 72% more area^[2]. A study of cloud-seeding runs between 2008 and 2014 in eastern China observed an approximately 21% increase in seasonal rainfall, while one seeding trial in northwestern China may have caused a 20% rise in rainfall over the trial region^[3,4]. However, some scientists view such results with skepticism, believing there isn’t enough evidence to credit cloud seeding for those differences. Supporting their position, a six-year-long project of winter cloud-seeding in Wyoming didn’t find sufficient evidence to show that cloud seeding made a statistically significant difference^[5].

What we do have, on the other hand, is strong evidence that cloud seeding doesn’t work on hurricanes. In the 1960s, the US government launched Project Stormfury, an effort to weaken hurricanes with cloud seeding. Project Stormfury aimed to weaken the eye wall, the part of the hurricane with the strongest winds and the strongest destructive potential, by encouraging storm activity elsewhere in the hurricane. The observed effects were usually indistinguishable from natural fluctuations, and Project Stormfury was ultimately shuttered in 1983 and never restarted^[6]. 

After Project Stormfury’s closure, several scientists involved with the project wrote:^[6]

“Recent observations of unmodified hurricanes indicate: 1) that cloud seeding has little prospect of success because hurricanes contain too much natural ice and too little supercooled water, and 2) that the positive results inferred from the seeding experiments in the 1960s probably stemmed from inability to discriminate between the expected effect of human intervention and the natural behavior of hurricanes.”

Commentators such as Alex Jones have cited Project Stormfury as supposed evidence that Helene and Milton are being manipulated, but Stormfury’s results clearly indicate that there is no mechanism to effectively manipulate hurricanes.

Other technologies aren’t used for directing hurricanes

Claims that purport other kinds of technology can manipulate hurricanes are also baseless. Some claims pin the blame on HAARP and NEXRAD, two radio observatories used to monitor different parts of Earth’s atmosphere. As Science Feedback has covered in prior reviews, neither of these systems can manipulate hurricanes. 

HAARP – a common target of falsehoods and conspiracy theories – is a tool that physicists use to study the ionosphere, a part of Earth’s upper atmosphere that is electrified thanks to the incessant bombardment of radiation from the sun. HAARP conducts its observations by using a radio beam to excite small bits of the atmosphere above 80 kilometers (50 miles), many times greater than the height of hurricane clouds, which typically rise to about 6 kilometers (4 miles). Hurricanes do not occur in the ionosphere, and HAARP has no ability to manipulate them. Additionally, HAARP is located in Alaska, thousands of miles away from any hurricane-prone region, and it is unclear how HAARP could be positioned to have any effect on hurricanes (see Figure 2).

NEXRAD is a network of radar stations that scan the surrounding atmosphere with radio waves in order to monitor the weather. NEXRAD does observe at ground level, but its stations do not emit anywhere near enough energy to alter the weather at all, let alone a hurricane. Nor does HAARP. Shirley Murillo, Deputy Director of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, commented to Science Feedback in a prior review:

“The amount of energy sent out by NEXRAD radars is small compared to the amount of energy expended in a hurricane. The hurricane consists solely of air and water and the beam either just passes through or is partially reflected back by small water drops. It doesn’t have enough energy to move even those tiny drops. As for HAARP, it’s in Alaska and its antennae are pointing up toward the ionosphere. There’s no way the beams would intercept a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. It is not broadcasting enough energy to move water droplets so it couldn’t ‘push’ a storm even if it were aimed at a storm.”

More recently, many scientists have proposed ways of modifying Earth’s weather in order to counter global warming from greenhouse gasses: for example, placing aerosols in the stratosphere or modifying clouds to reflect more sunlight back into space^[7]. These techniques belong to a much larger batch of ideas known as solar geoengineering (which also includes even more ambitious proposals, like building sunshades in Earth orbit). 

The purpose of solar geoengineering is not to prevent storms, but to cool the atmosphere. No solar geoengineering methods propose the goal of intentionally steering hurricanes into populated areas. Even if solar geoengineering projects had side effects that affected hurricanes in some way, no solar geoengineering proposal has been tested on a large enough scale to leave even a discernible mark on the environment, as of this writing. 

A patent is a legal document, not a scientific one

In the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, many social media users dug up U.S. patent filings to list technologies supposedly being used to manipulate the weather. For example, see this Instagram post, claiming the existence of “well over 200 patents related to this technology” and highlighting six examples. These claims misinterpret patents and their purpose. A patent gives its holder legal rights over an invention. It is not proof that the invention has ever been used.

For one, not all patent applications are accepted. Claims like the mentioned Instagram post fail to differentiate between patents and rejected patent applications. Science Feedback looked at the six examples in the Instagram post referenced above and found that four of the six cited “patents” were actually unsuccessful or abandoned applications. The U.S. Patent Office can reject an application if the applicant doesn’t adequately show that they have created the idea, if they don’t respond to the office’s follow-up questions, or if they withdraw the application. All patent applications are usually unsealed and made public after a set period of time (in the U.S., 18 months after they are sent). 

And even a successful patent is not proof of an invention’s effectiveness; it simply gives the patent-holder exclusive commercial rights to the invention. Consequently, a patent is essentially a legal document, not a scientific or technical one. Although patent applications do often contain technical information, they are often not written by scientists or engineers, but by lawyers. While patent applications do usually contain an argument that their invention works, they aren’t required to (and generally don’t) provide an experimental methodology, statistically significant results, or peer review – things that are required in the scientific community for results to be deemed credible.

Patent offices around the world have received thousands of applications for supposed weather-control inventions – the U.S. Patent Office even has a specific category for them — but there is no reason to believe that any of them are necessarily valid. In fact, there is reason to believe that most patents never actually see use at all. One estimate says that 95% of patents are never commercialized. To wit, one of the other two patents named in the above Instagram patents was for a proposed system to prevent hurricanes with focused microwaves from orbit. This idea earned a patent in 2023, but there is no evidence of any use. The final named patent was a cloud seeding method granted a patent back in 1951 and which appears to have only ever been used by local cloud seeding efforts in Oregon, far from hurricane-prone lands.

Conclusion

In short, we don’t have the technology to manipulate hurricanes. Hurricanes are extraordinarily powerful storms. Our current weather modification methods, which usually involve cloud seeding, cannot create or redirect hurricanes. While the U.S. government did in the past attempt cloud seeding to modify hurricanes – specifically, to weaken them – they shut down their program after concluding that it was ineffective. There is no evidence that these methods are now effective and being used to manipulate hurricanes. 

Furthermore, there is no evidence for more fanciful claims of weather modification, such as those accusing HAARP or NEXRAD of reshaping the lower atmosphere. Neither of these facilities have either the power or the ability to manipulate hurricanes; in fact, they are not used to manipulate weather at all. Furthermore, while many claims cite long lists of patents, there is no evidence that most of these patents have ever been used at all. There is certainly no evidence that any of them have been used to move storms that scientists say are impossible to move with today’s technology.

REFERENCES

1. National Research Council. (2003) Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research.
2. Al Hosari et al. (2021) The UAE Cloud Seeding Program: A Statistical and Physical Evaluation. Atmosphere.
3. Wang et al. (2019) The Extra-Area Effect in 71 Cloud Seeding Operations during Winters of 2008–14 over Jiangxi Province, East China. Journal of Meteorological Research.
4. Zheng et al. (2021) Evaluation of the First Negative Ion-Based Cloud Seeding and Rain Enhancement Trial in China. Water.
5. Rasmussen et al. (2018) Evaluation of the Wyoming Weather Modification Pilot Project (WWMPP) Using Two Approaches: Traditional Statistics and Ensemble Modeling. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. 
6. Willoughby et al. (1985) Project STORMFURY: A Scientific Chronicle 1962–1983. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
7. Observatoire Défense et Climat. (2023) Solar geoengineering: Geostrategic and defence issues.