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Show 6hud sooc program no in fifth year stationed at St. George and two at Salt Lake City). Eight meteorologists are devoted to the cloud seeding project: five in Salt Lake City (two of whom direct the state wide operations, and three aircraft observers); one each at Milford and Roosevelt where weather radar ra-dar and balloon tracking stations sta-tions are located; and one in St. George, who conducts airborne air-borne operations with the plane stationed there. Support Sup-port personnel, technicians, and pilots are stationed at Salt Lake City, Milford, (Continued on Page 2) For the fifth consequtive year the Utah Water Re -sources Development Corporation Cor-poration is sponsoring a weather modificaton program pro-gram with the intent of increasing in-creasing snowpack in the mountains. The program, conducted by North American Weather Consultants, encompasses en-compasses the following southern, central and west central counties: Tooele, Juab, Millard, Beaver, Washington, Garfield, Piute, Wayne, Sevier, Emery, Sanpete, San-pete, Carbon, Grand and San Juan. In addition to these 14 counties, North American Weather Consultants is also operating a snowpack increase in-crease program for Uintah, Duchsene, and Daggett counties. coun-ties. These 17 counties are being assisted financially through . cost -sharing funds from the Utah Water Resources Re-sources Division. The 1977-78 program, which runs from November 15th through April 15th, consists con-sists of seeding clouds with an expected return of 10 to 20 increase in snowpack. The primary means of seeding seed-ing are with 100 ground bas -ed cloud nuclei generators which are located throughoi the target area with local res idents, who turn on the generators gen-erators when contacted by the project personnel in Salt Lake City. These ground "seeders" release silver-iodide silver-iodide particles that are carried car-ried up into the clouds witt the air rising up and over tin mountain barriers. These particles stimulate the storn to snow more than it woul naturally without seeding. Another means of releas. ing the silver -iodide par-icles par-icles is from airborr "seeders" which are attached attach-ed to the three aircraft de voted to the program (one HERE'S MORE ABOUT Cloud Seeding Roosevelt, Centerfield, and St. George which brings the total to 22 individuals who are dedicated to the program. The success of the Utah Cloud Seeding Program; which happens to be the largest larg-est operational weather modification modi-fication project in the world (area-wise); is limited by a couple of factors. The main one being that snowfall cannot can-not be increased if there are no storms (or clouds). The basic concept of cloud seeding is to improve upon the efficiency of naturally occurring oc-curring storm systems. One other limitation is that not all storms can be seeded with a net result of increased snowfall. snow-fall. Research programs conducted throughout the Western United States have, shown that certain types of ' storms present the greatest opportunity for Increases, while others produce no increased in-creased precipitation whatsoever. what-soever. Therefore, it is necessary nec-essary for the project personnel per-sonnel to continually monitor moni-tor all aspects of the storm in order to determine whether whe-ther or not it should be seeded. Some of the storm parameters the meteorologists meteorolo-gists look for are: temperature tempera-ture at the top of the clouds, cloud depth, direction and speed of the winds (at the surface and higher in the atmosphere), at-mosphere), and moisture available. These and other variables are monitored through the National Weather Service data (received at No. American Weather Consultants Consul-tants Salt Lake City office) and North American Weather Consultants own data network net-work and equipment (such as the two weather radar and balloon bal-loon tracking stations). Even though the program has these limitation, the participating par-ticipating counties should expect ex-pect on the order of 10 to 20 increasing of snowpack (and associated increases in spring run -off) above what would have occurred naturally. natural-ly. These sort of statistics have been verified on similar simi-lar programs conducted in the Western United States, and are arrived at through comparing actual precipita- tion records over several years of operations of the individual in-dividual programs. Because of the natural variability of precipitation, it would be im possible to look at a single sin-gle storm and arrive at a "percentage -of -increase" number. Presently the Utah Water Resources Division is monitoring the cloud seeding programs, and after a few years of data, should be able to estimate just what the effects ef-fects have been and what might be expected in the future. Operations up to and including in-cluding the Christmas weekend week-end have been primarily in the northern portions of the State, However, there was one storm in mid-December where moderate to heavy snows were reported throughout the State, and atmospheric at-mospheric conditions cooperated co-operated such that seeding seed-ing was conducted in all areas for over 36 hours. From time to time during dur-ing the project season, No. American Weather Consultant Consul-tant plan to inform the general gen-eral public of the program operations through pressreleases pressre-leases in various papers pa-pers througout the State. |
