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12 CLOUD SEEDING all benefits generated. Others will find it difficult to identify and charge for external costs associated with their operations, and it may inevitably be a poor allocation of resources in either case to attempt to do so (Crutchfield 1969). On the national scale, the severe-to-extreme 1987-89 drought affected over half of the United States and invoked agricultural and other losses that reached at least $39 billion. It illustrated our vulnerability to the simple lack of normal rainfall which still provokes serious disruptions in water supply, agriculture, transportation, environmental quality, and other sectors of the economy. This occurs "despite decades of crop breed- ing, water system development, and other improvements in climate-sen- sitive technologies like cloud seeding" (Reibsame et al. 1990). Seedable clouds are normally sparse during a drought, so cloud seeding normally is not an appropriate emergency response. However, when applied in key regions over many consecutive years, successful precipitation en- hancement still promises one path to reduce national as well as local vulnerability, economic and otherwise, to fluctuations in natural precipi- tation. A global view is that successful weather modification practices could substantially increase world food supply, thereby making it a good long- term investment (Walkinshaw 1985). This kind of consideration includes intangibles affected by cloud seeding, Le., those nonmarketed items on which it is impossible to place precise monetary values. Intangibles can include personal convenience (e.g., improved skiing) or inconvenience (shoveling added snow), environmental benefits or liabilities, or matters affecting welfare such as the food supply. In all, there are no simple anSWers or alternatives in assessing costs and benefits of cloud seeding. There are, instead, many gray areas of compro- mise that must be acknowledged and considered (Dennis 1980). This is illustrated in the following discussion, where the economics for two different situations are considered: cloud seeding is applied to enhance direct rainfall on crops (generally summer cloud seeding), and when additional water from seeding is impounded and released in a controlled manner for later use (generally winter cloud seeding). 2.2.1 Economic Aspects of Summer Cloud Seeding A number of studies of the economic effects of summer precipitation enhancement have been conducted in the United States, primarily for the High Plains and the Midwest. The approaches and results reveal appro- priate response variables and the levels of sophistication possible in such assessments as well as fundamental differences dictated by geography. 2.2.1.1 High Plains. Early studies (Rudel and Myers 1973; Stroup 1973) properly recognized that obtaining additional precipitation would have both direct and secondary effects on farming and ranching economics. When projecting changes in farm yields and revenues from added rain-