Forty years ago, the federal government not only endorsed weather-modification projects, it ran its own, dubbed Project Storm Fury.
Scientists theorized that by seeding the outer rain bands of a hurricane with silver iodide, the eye would expand and its rotation would slow, just as a spinning ice skater does when she holds out her arms.
To test the theory, several experiments were done with actual hurricanes during the next two decades, and results appeared promising, the most dramatic being with Hurricane Debbie in 1969.
The storm was seeded five times, during which its peak winds dropped from 115 mph to about 80. Each time the storm would eventually return to its previous strength, but each time subsequent seeding seemed to slow it down again.
Despite this, scientists argued that the researchers' intervention didn't necessarily deserve the credit. Hurricanes are sensitive phenomena, known to wobble, change paths, speed up and slow down many times. There was no way to prove that the cloud seeding had anything to do with the storm's behavior, they argued.
But one researcher, Joanne Simpson, a pioneer in the field, says political meddling made the work intolerable.
In an interview nine years after the project was abandoned in 1980, the meteorologist said, "The reason I got out of it was because there was so much hassle and so much unpleasantness that it got impossible to do any work. More time was spent dealing with the politics and putting out the fires than in trying to learn about hurricanes. I think that's why a lot of people have been driven out of weather modification."
Now 81 and in failing health, Simpson was unavailable for comment. But William Cotton, professor of atmospheric sciences at Colorado State University, who has worked with Simpson, thinks she is still a proponent of such research, as he is.
Storm Fury only failed, he says, because it didn't go far enough. The number of storms seeded was fewer than 10. The research needed 25 to 30 seasons of storms.
"But nobody's willing to fund a project for 25 or 30 years anymore," he says. "You're lucky if you get funding from more than one (presidential) administration. But one way or another – whether you have success or you don't – we need to know if there is merit to the idea."
– KATE SANTICH