Show 41444ao See Cover 0 el Immor pment weather may be getting out of hand — at least the courts and Congress have some searching decisions to make The ability - ? to control the r e ij BY T F JAMES In January 1965 the airport in Reno Neg vada was closed for several days by a bank of clouds and fog 1500 feet deep and more than 50 to too miles across But within 15 minutes after scientists from the Desert Research Institute flew into it spewing granulated dry ice behind their planes amazing things began to happen Holes opened in the cloud bank permitting the planes to descend and land at Reno in perfect safety Even more significant snow fell in sufficient quantity towhiten the ground Five times on three different days the scientists went aloft and each time the clouds opened and snow fell— Nowhere else below this huge horizontal expanse of cloud did it snow on any of these days There have been few experiments that demonstrate more graphically man's newest and most awesome power All but unnoticed by the general public men have been changing the weather in the United States for more than 20 years It has now reached the point where some 40 or commercial weather firms are at work and the 50 number of government and university research projects is nearing the same figure In 1962 the last time anybody stopped to count there were no less than 6 t 20 scientists and engineers in the field And there is scarcely one state or federal law that attempts to coordinate or organize this activity which has enormous potential for good — or evil — over our lives They still talk about the battle that erupted eight years ago in Jeff Davis County near El Paso Texas when farmers hired Southwest Weather Research Inc a private firm to suppress the hailstorms that regularly wreaked havoc on local crops Southwest sent its planes up every time a thunderhead or any other type of cloud began to form Again and again they "seeded" the clouds with silver iodide crystals In a matter of minutes the threatening shape in the sky would dwindle into fuzzy mist low-lyin- hail-hurli- I The case of til vanishing - 6 The farmers were delighted But their cattlemen neighbors were dis- n mayed Southwest not only thuds also hail rain—which but pressed they wanted very badly for their parched ranchlands When promising rain clouds disappeared before their unbelieving eyes they decided to sue Judge 'C E Patterson issued an injunction barring Southwest from seeding any more clouds in Texas skies that year Equally sensational from an opposite point of view was the experience of Georgia farmers during 1955 When no rain fell in Candler County during January February and March local growers hired Dr Irving P Krick one of the best known weather sup-rei- modifiers The day after he began seeding clouds three inches of rain fell in Candler and within a month Krick was repeating the same miracle in 12 Georgia counties A Candler farmer cheerfully declared "Crops are the best we've had in 5 years" engineered the whole scheme to kill competition Here is where weather modification stirs up potent legal and diplomatic entanglements In the early 1950s New York City hired modifier Wallace Howell to seed clouds in upper New York State in the hope of easing Gotham's severe water shortage A resort-ownin the upstate watershed area asked the court to stop Howell arguing that when rain fell it was putting him out of business The court ruled that the needs of lo000000 's New Yorkers outweighed the right to sunshine But did it really? The National Science Foundation in a recent comment on the case pointed out that if the owner had asked for damages rather than trying to stop the seeding the judge might have rendered an opposite opinion The case had other more ominous ramifications In the past yearovith New York in the grip of another drought a 6mber of upstate farmers have become convinced that have been modifiers weather to suppress surreptitiously hiring rain to create profitable weekends the possibility of Meteorologists pooh-poo- h weather modifiers causing a sustained drought Such drastic shifts in weather patterns are caused by 20-2- But Dr Krick too has had his troubles lie has been sued by an irate Oklahoma citizen who claimed that a Krick rainmaking project for Oklahoma City produced floods which severely damaged his property Krick's expertise (he is one of the world's most renowned meteorologists the man who among other things predicted the weather for the landings in World War II) convinced the court to rule in his favor er resort-owner- D-D- ay A more recent lawsuit involved the Pacific Gas and Electric pany which launched a cloud cause a food? seeding program near Lake California on the headwaters of the Feather River The company wanted to increase the snowfall around Almanor which would in turn increase the spring runoff for its dams Then below the dams a disas70 power-statio- n trous flood occurred causing damage in the millions Did weather Corn-change- Al-man- rs or resort-owne- rs MI ' - DR IRVING KRICK — D-D- ) 1 ‘: 10I N A group of soaked citizens sued Pacific Gas but there had been no unusual spillover at Lake Mmanor and the judge concluded the lake had contained whatever extra rainfall the seeding had produced A similar controversy aroused much of Canada's Quebec Province in the summer of 1965 when an almost continuous rainfall inundated the Saguenay-La- c a government-owne- d St Jean region Quebec-Hydr- o power utility had earlier in the year run a g program and the aroused Quebecois offered rewards to anyone who smashed one of the silver iodide generators There even were threats to assassinate the Minister of Natural Resources No matter how hard the government tried to explain that there was no known connection between its winter seeding and the summer downpour millions the French Canawhich cost dians stubbornly maintained that the seeding had set in motion atmospheric processes which could not be stopped More suspicious types opined that on the New York side of the border had cloud-seedin- resort-owne- who predicted the weather-chang- er weather for our landings says his operations have increased rainfall by 15 to 30 per cent — and reduced crop damage from hail by 70 to 80 per cent in the US and 60 to 90 per cent in Canada i1171k 4 a professional rs resort-owne- rs F ay ' changes in the upper atmosphere where weather modifiers do not for the moment venture But in the next breath the experts admit with unnerving candor how much we don't know about the weather Vincent J Schaefer Director of the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the State University of New York and the man who began modern weather modification in 1946 by dropping six pounds of dry ice into a supercooled cloud off Greylock Mountain in Massachusetts ticks off a few: "Such seemingly simple things as the formation of snow and rain the cause of the electrical charge buildup in thunderstorms and the structural features of cumulus clouds are inadequately understood at present despite decades of intensive studies" We are forced to fall back on what weather modifiers get in the way of results Dr Krick who eschews planes for strategically placed generators which spew seeding material cloudward has conducted almost around the world His operations have large international ramifications alto-cumul- us CI ti ti cl Sc A 01 ft te ol ta el tc |