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<br />increasing demand on the water supplies of the Colorado by 19135. <br />Salinity and other water quality problems may hinder the reUSE~ of <br />water to meet current and future water needs, <br />Colorado, whether it wants to be or not, sits squarely in <br />the middle of this water supply dilemma, The rivers, which are <br />the main water supply source for much of the arid southwestern <br />United States, originate in the Park, Central and San Juan <br />Mountain Ranges in Colorado. <br /> <br />. <br /> <br /> <br />, <br /> <br />I <br />a <br /> <br />-2- <br /> <br /> <br />B. Potential for Augmentation of Water Supplies <br />Through Weather Modification <br /> <br />One promising possibility is the use of weather modification <br />to increase the mountain snowpack during the winter season, ~'his <br />means of water supply increase would provide a real time benefit <br />to the State's winter recreation industry (a nonconsumptive use) <br />and a future benefit to meet both nonconsumptive and consumptive <br />use demands through increased runoff from the winter snowpack, <br />The 1978 final report of the Weather Modification Advisory Boa.rd, <br />established in 1976 by Congress to review the status of weather <br />modification, emphasized the potential for seeding winter storms, <br />The report states on Page 35 that "there is strong evidence that <br />snowfall from winter storms over Colorado mountains can be in- <br />creased by 10 to 20 percent provided that seeding can be limited <br />to clouds that have certain well-defined characteristics, Of all <br />the U,S, cloud seeding objectives considered, that of increasing <br />snowpack over the western mountains of the United States rests <br />upon the firmest theoretical and experimental ground," 1 <br />A 1979 Water and Power Resources Service (previously called <br />the Bureau of Reclamation) publication2 stated that the computed <br />average annual virgin flow of the Upper Colorado River Basin <br />(see Figure 1) for the 1952-1971 period was 13,014,000 acre-feet, <br />Estimates in the referenced publication conservatively place the <br />total amount of augmented streamflow potential from weather <br />modification at 1,315,000 acre-feet annually, which is a 10,1 <br /> <br />~._-<" "'..J~_ ~_"..___--"- <br />