|
<br />-
<br />
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />I
<br />
<br />4 Additional Topics and Other Modifications to the NRC Report
<br />
<br />4.1 The NOAA Atmospheric Modification Program
<br />
<br />The NRC report stated that very little research had been done on operational
<br />programs. From 1986 through 1995, the NOAA Federal-State Atmospheric Modification
<br />Program (AMP) funded weather modification research, first in Illinois, Nevada, North
<br />Dakota, and Utah, and in the latter years, also Arizona and Texas. This funding, on
<br />average about $500K per year per state (2 to 3 million dollars per year), was used to bring
<br />research components to ongoing operational cloud seeding programs in these states,
<br />Federal funds were never used to conduct any actual seeding, but allowed radars,
<br />radiometers, instrumented aircraft, and other physical and scientific (human) resources to
<br />be focused on those issues deemed to be of greatest concern. Three of the states, North
<br />Dakota, Illinois, and Texas, focused their available resources on warm season weather
<br />modification research, The other three focused their efforts on wintertime orographic
<br />cloud seeding.
<br />
<br />The executive summary of the NRC reports notes that, "Advances in
<br />observational, computational, and statistical technologies have been made over the past
<br />two to three decades that could be applied to weather modification." During the AMP,
<br />when funding was available, many of these technologies were brought to bear. North
<br />Dakota was able, with NOAA and NSF support, to field two significant field programs.
<br />The first, in 1989, was the North Dakota Thunderstorm Project (NDTP), and included the
<br />deployment of NCAR CP-3 and CP-4 C-band Doppler radars, the NOAA-ETL X-band
<br />circular-polarized Doppler radar, and instrumented aircraft from the University of North
<br />Dakota, the University of Wyoming, the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology,
<br />and the NCAR Sabreliner (Boe et aI., 1992), A NOAA WP-3D "Hurricane Hunter", and
<br />a tracer release aircraft provided by Weather Modification, Inc, augmented these aircraft.
<br />A similar but smaller scale program was conducted in 1993 (Boe, 1994), the North
<br />Dakota Tracer Experiment (NOTE, referenced only briefly by the NRC report).
<br />
<br />Both of these programs utilized Doppler radars, in situ cloud sampling, numerical
<br />modeling (see Section 3.4), and atmospheric tracers (chaff and sulfur hexafluoride) to
<br />study the transport and dispersion with actively growing convective cloud turrets, and
<br />established unambiguous linkages between seeding with glaciogenic agents and the
<br />subsequent cloud glaciation (e.g. Detwiler et aI., I 994a,b; Huston et aI., 1991; Martner et
<br />aI., 1992; Reinking and Martner, 1996; Stith et aI., 1996; Stith et aI., 1993; and Stith et
<br />aI., 1990). Figure 4.3 of the NRC report is from this research in North Dakota (Reinking
<br />and Martner, 1996), but the NRC report does not acknowledge it as having been weather
<br />modification research. This is not to say that this work is completed; to the contrary, only
<br />the first steps have been taken,
<br />
<br />The other states experienced similar successes. Some of the initial funding
<br />obtained under this program was used to build two new dual wavelength microwave
<br />radiometers and one short wavelength radar for use in the research programs in Utah, and
<br />Nevada, These research funds were also partly used for upgrading the trace chemical
<br />
<br />31
<br />
|