How can public access to WordPress query (e.g. author=) URLs be redirected?

Based on @czerspalace ‘s tips, I seem to have created a working filter for this.

I added the following function to the functions.php file in my twenty-twelve theme directory:

function redirect_author_query_to_home( $query ){
    if( is_author() ) {
        wp_redirect( home_url() );
        exit;
    }
}
add_action( 'parse_query', 'redirect_author_query_to_home' );