Cant we weaken hurricanes like Hurricane Katrina ?

oh, watching what a category 4 hurricane like Katrina can do is very very shocking... some of the aerial photographs just look the same as those taken during the Asian Tsunami - just miles of wooden and concrete rubble... looking at the catastrophy that Katrina has left behind, i started wondering if there had been any attempts to study about weakening these cat 4 of cat 5 hurricanes that easily cause around $20-$25 billion in damages like Andrew or Katrina and as you can guess, there had been some attempts but in vain :-( the major obstacle seems to be that, "these hurricanes cover tens of thousands of square miles even when they are just beginning and they draw their energy from air over hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean." So, whatever technique we adopt needs to cover such a huge area of the ocean, which is impossible. Next problem seems to be the intensity of the hurricane a hurricane releases heat energy equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding about every 20 minutes!

From 1962-1982, the US government led a research project called Project STORMFURY [2], which tried some silver iodide seeding technique to weaken hurricanes in their eye, but soon it turned out to be a failure due to lack of understanding of hurricane internals and so, the project was terminated concluding that we (little humans) need to study the nature of hurricanes more and that manipulating hurricanes without much understanding might also affect the heat distribution of our planet itself...

so, before reading these things, i was under the impression that, out of all the major natural disasters like volcanoes, quakes, tsunami (recent addition to my memory), and hurricanes, i thought hurricanes were the ones which had the best prospect of manipulation - but, may be not, for now... :-(

Weakening Hurricanes FAQ
Project Stormfury FAQ