Targeted artificial ocean cooling to weaken tropical cyclones would be futile

Abstract Proposals to use technology cool sea surface temperatures have received attention for the potential application of weakening a tropical cyclone ahead landfall. Here, an ocean-mixing aware maximum intensity theory finds that artificial ocean cooling could drastically weaken cyclones over high temperature and deep mixed layer environments, especially fast storm motion speeds. In contrast, realistic mesoscale numerical simulations reveal massive regions - largest evaluated here contains volume 2.1 × 10 4 km 3 area 2.6 5 2 artificially cooled waters two days before landfall by 15% but only under most ideal atmospheric oceanic conditions. Thus, fundamental provides unreachable upper-bound cannot be attained even expending vast resources.