Weather
modification
raises red flags,
but pushes ahead
By James Janega
JUPITER, Fla. - In a field brimming with optimistic and untested ideas, entrepreneur Peter Cordani has one of the boldest: airdrop 400 tons of superabsorbent powder into an approaching hurricane.
The powder would sap water from the hurricane, in theory slowing it and saving lives and millions of dollars. The project is in its infancy, facing skeptical scientists and daunting challenges. Its creator has spent $1 million already and must raise much more.
"We know it would suck the moisture out," he said. "The only thing we don't know about is the (impact on a) hurricane and the aftereffects."
Finding the answers could be the next step on the ambitious edge of a field called weather modification, an industry operating with scant government regulation and hardly any scientific proof its methods work.
A holdover from 1950s-era scientific theory, weather modification has drawn renewed interest with the growth of technology and 21st-century weather concerns. Its next aspirations - to combat Atlantic hurricanes or Western drought - may well prove the most far-reaching.
Weather modification already operates at a staggering scope. Projects in some three-dozen countries seek to save wine crops, ease drought and kill fog. The Chinese government spends $40 million a year to seed clouds for rain. Canadian insurance companies pay to suppress hailstorms blamed for crop damage.
In the U.S. there were 53 reported weather-modification projects last year with a combined price of more than $5 million, according to interviews and records filed with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is required to keep track of such projects.
About 1,900 pounds of silver iodide was scattered last year to tweak atmospheric moisture above 102,000 square miles out West - a patch of sky nearly twice the size of Iowa. An additional 30 projects already are booked for this year.
"It's like a religion. (Whether it works) depends on who you talk to and what you believe," said Steve Schmitzer, the Denver Water Board's chief of water resources analysis.
Where skeptics and proponents agree is that no one knows exactly how cloud seeding works, or how well - if at all.
The people paying to do weather modification aren't eager to stop and study it, an approach raising red flags with scientists.
"You're really playing with fire, because if you don't understand the fundamentals of what you're doing, you have no ability to predict the consequence of your actions," said Michael Garstang, a University of Virginia atmospheric scientist involved in a 2003 report on weather modification for the National Academy of Sciences. It called for fundamental study. "It's derelict not to have funded research," he said.
The rise, fall and rebirth of modern weather modification is an amusing and tantalizing tale.
It begins with Vincent Schaefer, a high-school dropout, apprentice toolmaker and tree surgery correspondence student taken in by a Nobel laureate with a shared a love of the outdoors who took him to the General Electric labs in New York as a research assistant.
Among other things, Schaefer studied ice, and in he 1946 tried to modify the weather by dumping dry-ice shavings from an airplane and making snow from cold fog. Soon after, meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut discovered silver iodide did the same.
After that, almost anything seemed possible. Parched states took up cloud seeding. The Soviet Union toyed with using warm Atlantic water to melt polar ice and open northern ports. From 1962 to 1983, the U.S. government tried to weaken hurricanes with silver iodide seeding.
All but the local programs eventually were shelved as infeasible or ineffective.
"The experiments I thought were successes 25 years ago have fallen under the guns of people who did careful statistical analysis," said Hugh Willoughby, a former NOAA Hurricane Research Division director, cautious proponent of weather modification's potential and researcher at Florida International University.
By the 1980s, the idea of weather modification - including cloud seeding - became a taboo in serious scientific circles, he said. Research spending dropped from a high of $20 million a year in the late 1970s to less than $500,000, the National Academy noted in 2003.
Its report called for more research funding but was ignored.
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