Gallery: The Tools of GRIP, NASA's Unprecedented Mission To Study Hurricane Formation

Thanks to BP, there won't be any hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico this year, probably next year, either and maybe the next year after that. NOAA is going to be dead wrong again this year because they won't look at the physics involved. Oil LUBRICATES, it lowers friction. Friction? You know that stuff that low pressure air in the center of a hurricane uses to drag the sea up into a hurricane storm surge? Storms will have less "pull" this year, never enough to form hurricanes.

The plane won't work, either. Flying through hurricane nesting areas during the hurricane breeding season disturbs the special sex that generates these monsters. You see, hurricanes are a large vertical formation of moving air. When you run horizontal slipstreams through it, young storms break up into thunderstorms. These flights dragging horizontal chaotic turbulence will do even more to thwart hurricane formation. The upshot? Despite highly favorable conditions otherwise, we won't have a single Gulf of Mexico hurricane this year.
NASA's money on the airplane will be well spent-- PREVENTING hurricane formation, but will they make any grand discoveries? Only if NASA pulls it's collective head out, and we all know federal government bureaucrats, don't we? So what's the chance of THAT happening, huh? Not much.