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Webinar #24 - Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Weather Modification: Does the seeding of clouds enhance precipitation? An old question revisited
Bart Geerts, Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie, WY
(biography)
"Back in the 1960’s through 1980’s, much research was conducted into advertent modification of weather. The Weather Channel’s recent documentary series “Hacking the Planet” gives a good survey of the ideas that were tested back then. Federal support for this work essentially ceased some 25 years ago in the US, not because of environmental or ethical concerns, but rather because of the difficulty of signal detection in the “noise’ of natural variability. Amidst this state of uncertainty, commercial interests in the United States and across the world have continued to invest in cloud seeding, mainly to increase precipitation.
In recent years the State of Wyoming has embarked on an ambitious project, the Wyoming Weather Modification Pilot Project. This is the most rigorous effort to date to determine the impact of ground-based glaciogenic cloud seeding on snowfall over Wyoming’s mountains. New observational tools and high-performance computing power now exist to revisit this old question. This talk will explain the basic physics behind weather modification, and it will survey cloud seeding efforts from the early days to the recent revival."
View the Webinar by clicking here: http://youtu.be/Br8W0sf3bdM
View Bart Geert's presentation slides  (5.9MB)
Resources:
The Weather Modification Association: http://www.weathermodification.org/
National Research Council 2003 report “Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research”: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10829
The AgI Seeding Cloud Impact Investigation (ASCII): http://journalofweathermodification.org/index.php/JWM/article/view/121
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