During an average year in the United States, some 800 tornadoes injure more than a thousand people. A California physicist believes it is possible to use blasts of microwave energy from a satellite to diffuse developing tornadoes before they can wreak their damage.

Bernard Eastlund, president of Eastlund Scientific Enterprises in San Diego, Calif., proposes using microwaves to heat the cool, rainy downdrafts that form a tornado. According to modeling by Eastlund on supercomputers at the University of Oklahoma's Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, about 100 million watts of energy added to the descending air column could disrupt a downdraft that otherwise might spawn a tornado.