Hate to be a dick QueEx, but that website is full of shit, lol. Basically they're saying fish oil has been used to calm the waters, so why not use it to calm hurricanes. Good idea, but not scientifically sound enough to try it. Plus, notice that there are no real details, and the references section is left out??
There is some truth to fish oil calming waves. Certain oils are amphiphilic (each molecule has an oily and a polar part) and act as surfactants (or surface actants). An example, soap, has an oily part that catches grime, while the polar part keeps it suspended in water so it rinses off. Sailors since the ancient days used fish oil to control waves near the boat, the fish oil reduces the surface tension of the ocean, and basically acts kinda like a lubricant between the wind and the ocean surface. So, the wind drags the water surface less, and the waves at the surface are smaller. This also makes it so the wind speed near the surface of the water is nearly unchanged (no drag), so the surface wind speed is near that of the high altitude wind speed. The change in wind speed per unit height is called wind shear, so when there is a large change in wind speed with height, there's high wind shear, and when there's no change in wind speed with height, there's no wind shear.
However, that being said, the change in wind shear as a result of putting surfactant on the ocean surface is probably not enough to cause a hurricane, but it won't stop one or even slow it down.
Hurricanes form when there is a low shear condition. So reducing the wind drag at the surface won't help keep hurricanes from forming.
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/hurr/grow/home.rxml
Ultimately, its the wind speed and direction, and the formation of a low pressure area with circulating winds that is the cause. The warm water from the ocean loses energy by evaporating water, which rises, making thunderclouds, which eventually return the water via precipication when the humid air has cooled. You can probably think of it as a circular low to high then high to low recirculation.
Basically, when a few thunderclouds come near each other, and the low pressure regions come into contact, the storm gets bigger. When there's a situation where the uplifting hot humid air is rising, and it's surrounded by the downfalling precipitation, that's a tropical depression. As the tropical depression gets stronger, the winds from the outer (down) regions to the inner (up) region at the water surface, instead of going directly to the center, they start twisting (it's related to what is called a Coriolis effect, which is related to the earth's rotation, but my professor says that it has not been established that the Coriolis effect is strong enough to do anything).
So now, there is a storm, with winds that are rotating, a core that has rising warm humid air, surrounded by rotating thunderstorm, and feeds on warm ocean water, gaining energy with the heat energy from the water and changing it into mechanical energy in wind. The stronger it gets, the bigger the hurricane. It slows down when it hits cooler water.
So, to create a Hurricane, you basically have to be able to heat the ocean several degrees (the energy to do so would be extraordinary) and then get some thunderstorms to come together to form a depression. Steering a hurricane, you would need to be able to control the atmospheric winds on the ocean, and it will take more than some fans to do that. Again, you would have to find a way to heat one area several degrees more than another area, big areas, too.
To stop a hurricane, someone came up with the idea of cooling down the eye to reduce the energy going into the storm. It has been inconclusive whether this works or not. Plus, since that energy is still there, and has not been dissipated, a future storm will form. I guess the aim is to keep hurricanes from forming, but allow tropical storms and thunderstorms.
http://hurricaneville.com/project_stormfury.html
Additionally, in order to seed a storm, that storm has to already be forming. You can't create a thundercloud, but (they say) you can seed a cloud to make it rain more, or earlier.
http://www.nawcinc.com/wmfaq.html
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/askjack/wfaqhurm.htm
FAQ: Attempts to weaken, destroy hurricanes
Answers by Jack Williams, USATODAY.com weather editor.
Q: Why don't they destroy or weaken hurricanes when they threaten land?
A: The basic problem is the size and intensity of hurricanes. They cover tens of thousands of square miles even when they are just beginning. They draw their energy from air over hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean. Cooling the water over this large area or finding a way to prevent evaporation of water would reduce hurricanes' strength. But, all of the dry ice in the world would be quickly absorbed in a small part of the ocean near a hurricane. Also, the hurricane would quickly move away from the cooled water or water covered with something to prevent evaporation.
The National Hurricane Center notes that a hurricane releases heat energy at a rate of 50 trillion to 200 trillion watts. (trillion here is used in the U.S. and French sense: a number followed by 12 zeros) This is the equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding about every 20 minutes.
Q: I saw a report on television about someone who had a substance that could be dropped into clouds and absorb water. They did an experiment where they dropped some on clouds off Florida and the clouds dissipated. The television reporter said this could be used to weaken hurricanes. Why isn't this done?
A: I've seen this report a couple of times, and both times I've been tempted to call the TV reporters and producers involved and offer them a good deal on a bridge in Brooklyn, N.Y. All reporters can't be expected to know a lot about everything they report, but they do owe it to their readers and viewers to find out what they don't know. A phone call to someone who knows about hurricanes, could have shown the problems with this idea.
The best discussion I've seen on this is in the FAQ on hurricanes on the NOAA Hurricane Research division Web site. If you go to the HRD's answer to this question, you'll see the idea has several problems, beginning with the claim that it caused clouds to dissipate. When I saw this I recalled something that a scientist who studies clouds told me several years ago, "You can make clouds go away by watching them." In other words, small cumulus clouds like those used in the "experiment' normally don't last very long. On a day when some of them will grow into thunderstorms, it's impossible to select the one that will grow since most of the clouds will quickly go away.
Q: Wouldn't a huge bomb weaken a hurricane? If they are worried about radioactivity, they could use powerful fuel-oil bombs.
A: A bomb or bombs would be a dead end since the amount of energy a hurricane is releasing and the size of its circulation would make any bomb, including the largest nuclear bomb, seem more futile than trying to stop a charging elephant by throwing a ping-pong ball at it. As noted above, hurricanes release tremendous amounts of heat energy. In fact, since hurricanes are "heat engines" that depend on the temperature contrast between warmth at the ocean surface and cold air aloft, we could wonder whether the heat from any kind of bomb would actually add to the storm's natural heat supply, making the storm stronger. Trying to heat the upper atmosphere with bombs, to lessen the heat contrast, would be like trying to heat the city of Minneapolis in January by opening the windows of a house.
Until recent years, many people suggested using nuclear bombs. But, doing that would create a hurricane with the danger of radioactivity as well as wind and storm surge.
Q: What happened to the idea of seeding hurricanes to weaken them?
A: During the 1960s the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tried a more sophisticated way of making hurricanes weaker. This research was known as Project Stormfurry. The basic idea was to seed clouds just outside the eye wall with silver iodide. The silver iodide, which is widely used in cloud seeding, encourages supercooled water - water that's colder than 32 degrees F but is liquid, not ice - to freeze. This releases latent heat, which would make the clouds grow, stealing some of the humid air that's helping the eye wall clouds grow and create strong winds.
This seemed to work with Hurricane Beulah in 1963 and Hurricane Debbie in 1969. But, scientists had no way of knowing whether these two storms would have weakened any way at that time. Hurricanes often weaken and then regain strength naturally. Also, since the 1980s researchers have found that most hurricanes don't have enough supercooled water for seeding to work.
Concerns were also raised that the experiments could make a storm change course, hitting some place that it otherwise wouldn't. The experiments did increase hurricane knowledge and also led to the purchase of the two WP-3 airplanes that NOAA still uses for hurricane research and tracking.
Bob Sheets, the retired director of the National Hurricane Center, and I have an entire chapter on Project Stormfury in our book, Hurricane Watch: Forecasting the Deadliest Storms on Earth. Bob was the last director of Stormfury.