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.. " 1. BACKGROUND AND INTRODUCTION .. 1.1 General Background This is the Final Report by Reclamation (Bureau of Reclamation) for a multi-year project which investigated the effectiveness of an operational weather modification (cloud seeding) project in Utah. This applied research was done in cooperation with .the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) AMP (Atmospheric Modification Program) and the Utah Division of Water Resources. While the Utah portion of the NOAA AMP (hereafter NOAA/Utah AMP) began several years earlier, the cooperative program discussed herein began late in 1989. At that time, Reclamation agreed to a Utah Division of Water Resources request that the author serve as the Principal Investigator for the NOAA/Utah AMP. The author continued in that capacity through 1996, at which time NOAA AMP funding was terminated by the U.S. Congress. Some additional analyses were performed after 1996 as reflected in this report. .. The NOAA AMP program was conducted for several years in cooperation with the states of Arizona, Illinois, Nevada, North Dakota, Texas, and Utah as discussed by Golden (1995). The Navajo Nation joined the program in 1994. However, the late 1996 program termination effectively ended federally funded weather modification research in the United States for the time being. This is very unfortunate considering the potential importance of this emerging technology which may be able to provide significant rainfall and snowfall enhancement under favorable circumstances. Operational (applied) weather modification (often called "cloud seeding") continues at many locations within the United States, especially in the western states and the Great Plains. Many other nations have been increasing their involvement in weather modification research as well as operations. The potential importance of rain and snow augmentation through properly applied cloud seeding is sufficient to stimulate progress in this complex field (Bulletin American Meteorological Society 1992). For example, the Seventh World Meteorological Organization International Scientific Conference on Weather '. Modification will be held in Thailand during February 1999 to discuss continuing progress. It was agreed at the onset among the three cooperating agencies of the NOAA/Utah AMP that preference would be given to publication of results in the open refereed literature, such as the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Journal of Weather Modification, and in papers presented at scientific conferences. Production of large and detailed project reports, with their limited readership, was avoided by Reclamation scientists. Accordingly, this report consists of a program overview (sections 1-7) plus a compilation of summary information from the 29 journal articles and conference papers published in recent years under the sponsorship of the NOAA/Utah AMP. These publications resulted from research done by a number of groups involved in the program during this decade. In addition to Reclamation, those groups included the University of Nevada DRI (Desert Research Institute), the University of North Carolina at Asheville, the University of Utah, NCAR (National Center fqr Atmospheric Research) and NA WC (North American Weather Consultants). NA WC is the private company which has conducted the Utah op~rational cloud seeding program since 1974 (Griffith et al. 1997). ;, The NOAA ERL (Environmental Research Laboratories) also had a major role in this program. This agency provided an instrumented cloud physics and plume tracking aircraft for two major field programs, including pilots and technical personnel needed to support the' sophisticated instrumentation systems. The NOAA/Utah AMP program was greatly enhanced by the NOAA ERL involvement. i- I . ! I I 1