Fun with meteorology

When I was a kid I had this idea that if you encircled a city with giant upward-facing flamethrowers, you could dissipate tornados as they approached.

Fortunately, no one ever put this innovation into practice.

But aiming weapons at the sky is not, apparently, just the purview of imaginative second-graders. According to this bit I found on CNN, a bunch of folks feel that shooting a (projectile-less) cannon into a storm prevents hail. As you can imagine, it also prevents their neighbors from liking them much.

"It sounds like artillery fire," said Gregory Connors, a 38-year-old software designer whose children have been woken up by the booms. "I'm up for everybody's right to farm. We support local farmers. But the technology and the way it's being utilized is not acceptable."

Personally, I don't think this goes far enough. Think of the additional applications of fighting weather with firepower. Stop earthquakes with lasers! Defuse hurricanes with nuclear blasts! Evaporate tsunamis with machinegun fire!

Wait, we could make it into a video game....