WMOD00390

• Title: A Proposed Wintertime Weather Modification Research Program for Colorado
• Date: 1/1/1980
• State: CO
• Weather Modification - Doc Type: Report

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increasing demand on the water supplies of the Colorado by 1985.
Salinity and other water quality problems may hinder the reuse of
water to meet current and future water needs.
Colorado, whether it wants to be or not, sits squarely in
the middle of this water supply dilemma. The rivers, which are
the main water supply source for much of the arid southwestern
United States, originate in the Park, Central and San Juan
Mountain Ranges in Colorado.

B. Potential for Augmentation of Water Supplies
Through Weather Modification

One promising possibility is the use of weather modification
to increase the mountain snowpack during the winter season. This
means of water supply increase would provide a real time benefit
to the State's winter recreation industry (a nonconsumptive use)
and a future benefit to meet both nonconsumptive and consumptive
use demands through increased runoff from the winter snowpack.
The 1978 final report of the Weather Modification Advisory Board,
established in 1976 by Congress to review the status of weather
modification, emphasized the potential for seeding winter storms.
The report states on Page 35 that "there is strong evidence that
snowfall from winter storms over Colorado mountains can be in-
creased by 10 to 20 percent provided that seeding can be limited
to clouds that have certain well-defined characteristics. Of all
the U.S. cloud seeding objectives considered, that of increasing
snowpack over the western mountains of the United States rests
upon the firmest theoretical and experimental ground." 1
A 1979 Water and Power Resources Service (previously called
the Bureau of Reclamation) publication2 stated that the compu.ted
average annual virgin flow of the Upper Colorado River Basin
(see Figure 1) for the 1952-1971 period was 13,014,000 acre-feet.
Estimates in the referenced publication conservatively place the
total amount of augmented streamflow potential from weather
modification at 1,315,000 acre-feet annually, which is a 10.1