Scientists urge government to fund weather modification

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Originally published 02:12 p.m., April 22, 2008
Updated 02:12 p.m., April 22, 2008

It's high time that 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 today.

The brainpower is available, instrumentation is vastly improved, but the feds haven't funded weather-modification research since the mid-90s, 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 that the West is experiencing thinner snowpacks and global warming may be stirring up more extreme weather, more wicked hurricanes.

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 noted that efforts are underway 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. That's why he's not very worried about purposeful modification efforts disrupting the natural cycle.

Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to provide relief to communities suffering from drought cycles, effects of global warming or the effects of regional pollution on cloud behavior.

"We can't chase clouds off or create clouds," he said. "This is not a drought-busting solution."

But there is a chance that planting the right particles in clouds can induce them to transform their moisture contents enough to drop the rain or snow rather than holding it in.

Arlen Higgins, a scientist for the Desert Research Institute said that under the right conditions snowfall enhancement projects can increase snowpack by 10 percent.

"But we're lagging behind by 10 or 15 years" compared to nations that devote more money to the effort, he said.

Right now, towns, power companies and irrigation districts are footing the bill, without help from the feds and without the evaluation tools that should properly fall to the federal government.

He said silver iodide occurs naturally at about 2 parts per trillion, but it's being found at five or 10 times that much in the snow below the seeded clouds.

The feds spent a lot of money in the 1960s on a project called Storm Fury to try to mitigate hurricanes, but little money since, said Golden, who is a senior research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder.

"It's now time for a fresh look," said Golden, who holds a joint appointment with the University of Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences. "We have a much better understanding now" of clouds and storm systems and "a great improvement of instruments."

Golden noted that during the Vietnam War the U.S. military engaged in a top-secret project to try to bolster the rainfall along the Ho Chi Minh trail to disrupt supply lines of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

There is no indication that the effort worked, primarily because there wasn't an evaluation piece to the top-secret effort, he said.

"We have no federal support for weather modification in this country," Golden said. "That's at a time when states and local governments are more actively involved in cloud seeding than ever before.

"And at a time when there are more stresses on water resources in the west than ever before."

He noted that western farmers continue to sell their farms to cities because of the cost and scarcity of water.

"People joke about water wars. But I think it's going to be real. And very nasty."