Scientists urge effort at modifying weather

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

It's high time the federal government fund research in modifying the weather to bring more rain to the thirsty West and to slow down deadly hurricanes, top scientists said Tuesday.

The brainpower is available, instrumentation is vastly improved, but the feds haven't funded weather-modification research since the mid-1990s, Joe Golden, a scientist specializing in atmospheric modification, said at an international symposium being held this week in Westminster.

Scientists urged federal funding, especially in light of evidence the West is experiencing thinner snowpacks and global warming may be stirring up more extreme weather.

New research also is essential because there needs to be better evidence that either long-standing cloud seeding efforts or newer approaches actually work, they said.

Many of the scientists at the symposium, sponsored by the American Meteorological Society and the Weather Modification Association, are dubious of efforts by Chinese authorities to reduce the rainfall during the two weeks Beijing will host the 2008 Olympics.

"They're spending $100 million a year on weather modification, but they're using 1960s and 1970s technology," said Roelof Bruintjes, a scientist at the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"I am very skeptical about what they say they can do," Bruintjes said. "There have been no scientific experiments that have ever shown that you can reduce rainfall."

The scientists are more sanguine about the possibility of increasing rainfall in places such as the western United States.

Areas such as Colorado's Front Range, with upslope weather patterns, could be especially promising, they said.

Aerosols from power plants and automobiles are changing cloud behavior and keeping clouds from shedding snow in upslope areas, leading to a 10 percent drop in snowpack, Golden said.

One long-standing attempt to bolster rainfall is infusing clouds with silver iodide, which mimics ice nuclei and, the believers say, can induce clouds to make more ice crystals and to drop rain or snow.

Proof of whether the infusion can increase snowpack will require the use of research airplanes, state-of-the-art instruments and enough experiments to ensure that it wasn't the natural variability of rainfall that made the difference.

Bruintjes's research involves using water-attracting particles such as potassium chloride that occur naturally. Making the particles bigger than they occur in nature can induce larger raindrops that fall more quickly and collide with smaller droplets on their way down, stimulating even more rainfall, he said.

"We are at an exciting moment in this field in terms of capability," he said.

He noted that efforts are under way in 11 states and in 69 foreign countries to induce greater rain or snowfall.

Yet, 90 percent of the money funding the efforts at NCAR come from foreign countries, just 10 percent from the U.S., he said.

What humans do inadvertently to change the weather - by releasing fossil fuels, for example - is far greater than purposeful weather modification, Bruintjes said. That's why he's not very worried about purposeful modification efforts disrupting the natural cycle.

scanlon@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2897

• April 23, 2008

  2:25 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Scott writes:

  Because RMN reposted this article I'll repost my comment:

  O.K. So now the "scientists" are going to milk the tax payers for big $$$ for weather modification when these weather guessers can't even get the 7 day forecast correct? Let alone long term forecasts, e.g. this winter was suppose to be mild/below average.

  Oink, oink. Feed that pig!

  Scott