
Ten unique government reports document the history of attempted weather and climate modification efforts, including Defense Department projections of future programs and a detailed history of Project Stormfury and related hurricane modification trials. Contents: A Recommended National Program In Weather Modification * Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 * Weather Modification Research and Development Policy Authorization Act of 2005 * Weather and Climate Modification: Report of the Special Commission on Weather Modification * Federal Weather Modification Efforts Need Congressional Attention * An Introduction to Weather Modification * Need for a National Weather Modification Research Program * Hurricane Modification * Project Stormfury * Hurricane Modification and Control Report (April 1971). Can human intervention diminish the force of a hurricane? From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s NOAA actively pursued Project STORMFURY, a program of experimental hurricane modification. The general strategy was to reduce the intensity of the storm by cloud seeding. The seeding, it was argued, would stimulate the formation of a new eyewall that would surround the existing eyewall. The new eyewall would contract, strangling the old eyewall and reducing the intensity of the hurricane. However, research carried out at AOML showed clearly that these "concentric eyewalls" happened often in unmodified hurricanes, thus casting doubt on the seemingly positive results of seeding in earlier experimentation. Hurricane Luis provides an example of this behavior. Moreover, observations showed that hurricanes contain little of the supercooled water necessary for cloud seeding to work. The American Meteorological Society policy statement on planned and inadvertent weather modification, dated October 2, 1998, indicates, "There is no sound physical hypothesis for the modification of hurricanes, tornadoes, or damaging winds in general, and no related scientific experimen
Page Count:
315
Publication Date:
2017-05-07
ISBN-10:
1521240884
ISBN-13:
9781521240885
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