What if hurricanes could be steered?

A hurricane is a giant storm that spins. It grows over warm sea water.

What if we could push a hurricane away from towns? Let's imagine it.

A hurricane is a giant storm that spins around a calm center called the eye. It forms over warm ocean water, and its winds blow at least 74 miles per hour.

What if people could steer a hurricane, pushing it away from towns and back out to sea? In this thought experiment, you can follow three paths: how a hurricane grows, why steering one is not possible, and how better forecasts help people stay safe.

Tropical cyclones are called hurricanes when they form over the Atlantic or the eastern Pacific; NASA notes that the scientific term for all of them is tropical cyclone. A storm becomes a hurricane when its sustained winds reach 74 mph.

No one can steer or stop a hurricane today. This thought experiment asks why not, by looking at where a hurricane's energy comes from and what decides its path, and then compares the imagined power to steer with the tool that really protects people: forecasting. Any outcome of steering is an idea, not a prediction.

Warm, wet air rises from the sea. It makes clouds.

More air rushes in and starts to spin. The storm gets bigger and bigger. Over land, it gets weaker.

NASA describes a hurricane as a giant engine that uses warm, moist air as its fuel. Warm air rises from the ocean, leaving lower air pressure below. Air from around it pushes in, warms, and rises too, and the water vapor in it forms huge rings of clouds.

The whole system spins and grows, fed by the ocean's heat and by water evaporating from the surface. North of the equator it spins counterclockwise. When a hurricane moves over land, it loses its warm-water fuel and usually weakens.

The National Weather Service lists the usual ingredients: ocean water warmer than about 26°C (79°F), a position at least 5 degrees of latitude from the equator so Earth's spin can start the rotation, moist air through the lower and middle atmosphere, weak changes of wind with height (low wind shear), and a starting disturbance; in the Atlantic, many hurricanes begin as a cluster of thunderstorms moving off the coast of Africa.

The heat that drives a hurricane is released when water vapor condenses as moist air rises around the eyewall. Stronger winds evaporate more seawater, which feeds more condensation: a feedback that lets the storm intensify while it stays over warm water. A typical hurricane is about 300 miles wide, with a calm eye 20 to 40 miles across.

Let's pretend we had a giant storm steering wheel.

We might turn hurricanes away from beaches and towns. But this is only pretend. Nobody can do it.

Now imagine a pretend machine that could push a hurricane wherever people chose. Towns on the coast might never need to board up their windows. Storms might be sent back out to sea.

But even in this pretend world, problems might appear. Pushing a storm away from one coast might send it toward someone else. And hurricanes carry huge amounts of rain, so moving one might also move where that rain falls. These are ideas to think about, not things anyone can do.

Suppose a technology could move a hurricane's track. The obvious benefit would be keeping wind, rain and storm surge away from coastlines. The harder questions follow at once: who decides where the storm goes, and what happens to the places it is sent toward? Moving a storm might also move the rain it carries.

These are reasoned ideas, and none of them describes anything possible today. The real obstacles are physical. A hurricane's energy dwarfs anything people produce, and the National Weather Service explains that its speed and path depend on complex ocean and atmosphere interactions, including other weather patterns nearby.

A hurricane is much, much stronger than any machine.

Big winds all around it push it along, like a leaf on a river. People cannot push those winds.

A hurricane is incredibly powerful. NOAA hurricane scientist Chris Landsea worked out that the heat released as an average hurricane makes its clouds and rain is about 200 times all the electricity the world's power plants could make in 1996.

A hurricane's path is set by the huge patterns of wind and air pressure around it, which stretch across thousands of miles. People cannot move those patterns. From 1962 to 1983, US scientists in a project called Stormfury tested whether seeding hurricane clouds could weaken the storms, but the changes they saw were almost impossible to tell apart from the changes hurricanes go through on their own.

Landsea's estimate starts from an average hurricane's rainfall, a little over half an inch a day across a circle about 825 miles wide. Condensing that much water releases about 600 trillion watts of heat, roughly 200 times worldwide electrical generating capacity as of 1996. Only about half a percent of it, he notes, goes into warming the core, lowering the pressure and spinning up the winds; the rest drives rising air and leaves as 'cold exhaust' high in the atmosphere.

Tracks are set by the large-scale flow around the storm, which the NWS says makes speed and direction very hard to predict. Project Stormfury (1962 to 1983) tested whether seeding with silver iodide could weaken hurricanes; a 1978 NOAA review of its experiments, by Helmut Weickmann, raised concerns about claims of a positive seeding effect. The National Weather Service's history of the project notes that hurricanes turned out to hold less supercooled water than the idea needed, and that seeding results were almost indistinguishable from natural changes in intensity. The project ended in 1983.

Weather satellites watch hurricanes from space.

Forecasters tell people where a storm may go. Families get ready early, and some move to a safer place.

Instead of steering storms, people forecast them. GOES weather satellites, built by NASA and run by NOAA, watch hurricanes from 22,300 miles above Earth and help forecasters predict where and when a storm will reach land.

The National Hurricane Center says its track forecasts have improved steadily over the past three decades. In 2025, for the first time, it used artificial intelligence models in its real-time forecasting. Hurricane season in the Atlantic runs from June 1 to November 30, and the National Weather Service encourages families to plan before it begins.

The National Hurricane Center's 2025 verification preview shows track errors falling steadily and substantially from 1990 to 2025, despite year-to-year ups and downs. For Hurricane Melissa in 2025, the average 5-day track error was about 100 nautical miles (115 miles), roughly half the typical error of the previous five years. The 2025 season was also the first in which NHC used AI-based models in real-time operations.

Intensity remains harder: rapid intensification, a jump of at least 35 mph in 24 hours, is still one of the toughest forecast problems. The NWS names storm surge and flooding from heavy rain as the two leading causes of hurricane deaths in the United States, which is why forecasts of where and when a storm arrives give people time to prepare or move to safety.