WMOD00569

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

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FOREWORD

Identifying needed institutional changes or innovation

Providing sound inputs to all parties at interest

Preventing a. socially destructive technology from developing
(an unusual but not impossible outcome)

The material covered in this book relates to many of these possible
activities.
This particular study is one of many at various stages
sponsored by the Office of Exploratory Research and Problem
Assessment in the Research Applications Directorate in the
National Science Foundation. The general goals of the NSF
technology assessment program are

To provide a substantive, comprehensive, useful input into
public policy formulation and decision-making with regard to
the application of particular technologies.

To explore and encourage technology assessment and the ap-
plication of systematic methods, techniques, protocols, and
approaches to complex policy-related problems

To encourage the growth of organizational capability to con-
duct impartial, comprehensive technology assessments

To encourage the expansion of the concept of impact analysis
to include the impacts of social technology, social invention,
and institutional change

SNOWPACK, CLOUD-SEEDING, AND THE COLORADO RIVER

economic costs and benefits or immediate implications for the
perpetrator or user of technology. The extension into the full
range of social, economic, political, international, legal, and
other societal impacts demands a degree of skill and sophisti-
cation rarely brought to the management of technology. The
second feature of technology assessment is its focus as a policy
study on informing the interested publics and the decision-
makers of the possible range of consequences for new actions.
Sound assessments should put into the hands of all interested
parties reliable information to help them formulate their deci-
sions and to generate more socially desirable management
strategies. Furthermore, there should be cumulative benefits
from making the discussions and the implementations of the
management of technology far more sophisticated than they
have been in the past. A third aspect of technology assessment is
the attempt to organize and draw policy guidance from both
what is known with some certitude and what is not known.
Normally one anticipates that policy flows out of knowl-
edge; but in the effective management of technology, viable
policies must flow out of both what we know and what we do
not know. Consequently, one may anticipate that a technology
assessment wi11lead to one or more of the following actions:

To serve the growing needs in the federal agencies for advice,
guidance, and assistance in technology assessment

To meet the mandated cooperative activities associated with
the formulation of the Office of Technology Assessment by the
Congress

Modifying the project or technology to reduce disbenefits or to
increase benefits

Defining a monitoring or surveillance program with regard to
the technology as it becomes operational

With regard to any particular assessment of a technology, the
sponsoring organization is faced by several difficulties: identi-
fying organizations which can adequately perform the assess-
ment; assuring that their methods, techniques, and strategies for
conducting the study are adequate; not only assuring that the
investigators have the widest latitude of independence, but also
driving them to use their independence. An effective technology

of

Stimulating research and development to
(a) Define risks more reliably
(b) Forestall anticipated negative effects
(c) Identify alternative methods of achieving
the technology
(d) Identify feasible corrective measures for negative effects

the goal

into

a technology

Identifying regulatory or other control needs

of

Encouraging the legislative development
new areas to exploit anticipated benefits

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