WMOD00569

• Title: Snowpack, Cloud Seeding and the Colorado River
• Date: 1/1/1974
• Weather Modification - Doc Type: Report

SNOWPACK, CLOUD-SEEDING, AND THE COLORADO RIVER

unintended weather changes. For example, all of the following
activities have without question resulted in weather modifica-
tion, although the exact extent is unknown

Increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide and particles in
the lower atmosphere by burning fuels in automobiles, power
plants, and factories

exhaust and

Changing the nature of large tracts of the earth's surface by
clearing land and cultivating crops, and by putting up buildings
and paving roads and parking lots

Inadvertent weather modification, although little understood,
is a recognized by-product of industrial civilization.

Fig. 1. The potential extent of an operational program In the Upper Colo-
rado RIver Basin In comparIson to the pilot project

5 /

Durin!! the last four winter seasons (1970-71, 1971-72, 1972-
73, 1973-74), several organizations under contract to the
federal government have been collaborating in a program of
seeding clouds in the San Juan Mount~ns of southwestern
Colorado. This program is called a pilot project-that is, the
purpose and the size are between those of an experiment and
those of a full-scale operation. The Colorado River Basin Pilot
Project will prove or disprove the results of previous short-term
and small-scale experiments, over a much larger territory and
for a longer duration. It is sufficiently large so that the costs and
results can be scaleq-up for an operation covering the entire
Upper Colorado River Basin (Figure 1).
The idea behind the Colorado River Basin Pilot Project is
a simple one. Most of the water supply of the Basin comes from
the mountains where precipitation is abundant. (Large areas in
the interior of the Basin where precipitation is low year-round
contribute little water to the streams.) During the winter, the
precipitation is mostly snow, which accumulates to great depths
in the higher elevations. As temperatures rise in the late spring

4

Doing Something About the Weather

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Contaminating the upper atmosphere with aircraft
rocket exhaust