Electricity in clouds

Various schemes have been employed to modify the electrical nature of clouds and the occurrence of cloud-to-ground lightning. Research has shown that by releasing large quantities of ions near the ground, it is possible to influence the electric properties of small cumulus clouds. This does not mean, however, that large clouds could be influenced in this manner. Attempts to create electrical discharges artificially in order to prevent lightning from striking rockets on the launchpad is an area of active research at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

There is no convincing evidence supporting the assertion that the release of electrically charged particles will influence the precipitation from fogs or clouds.

An extensive program dealing with the modification of lightning storms has been conducted by the U.S. Forest Service. Potential lightning storms were seeded heavily with silver iodide nuclei. The lightning characteristics of some traveling thunderstorms apparently were changed, but it still was not demonstrated conclusively that cloud-to-ground lightning can be reduced.

Hail suppression

In many areas of the world hail does enormous destruction to agriculture, particularly fruit orchards and grain fields. There have been cloud-seeding projects aimed at reducing hail damage. Some operations have attempted to put so many nuclei into the supercooled parts of cumulonimbus that they would be almost totally converted to ice crystals. Such a procedure, called overseeding, is not considered practical because of the large quantities of material needed to seed the clouds over an area great enough to have an appreciable effect.

Most hail-suppression attempts have been based on the concept that damage will be reduced if the hailstone sizes are reduced. This does not require overseeding. Consider, for example, an unseeded cloud that produces one hailstone having a two-centimetre diameter in each cubic metre of air. If ice-nuclei seeding could cause 100 uniform hailstones in the same volume from the same available quantity of supercooled water, their diameters would be about 0.4 centimetre. The small stones would melt as they fell through the layer of warm air below the freezing level. Even if they did not melt completely to form rain, by the time the hailstones reached the ground they would be too small to do any serious damage.

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Silver iodide seeding of potential hailstorms has been carried out in many countries. Most of the ice nuclei have been dispersed from ground-based or aircraft-mounted generators. In Switzerland it appeared that there may have been more hail produced by seeding. In Argentina the results seemed to depend on the type of weather situation. In the United States varying results have been reported.

Soviet experimenters injected ice nuclei directly into the supercooled parts of clouds by means of rockets or artillery. In the latter technique a projectile explodes and disperses the nuclei. The rockets carry a cylinder of a pyrotechnic substance impregnated with silver iodide or lead iodide. It passes through the cloud while burning for a period of 45 seconds. Spectacular success in hail reduction was reported by Soviet scientists. The benefit-to-cost ratios cited ranged from 4 to 1 up to 17 to 1. There have been no independent tests of these procedures, and as a result many other atmospheric scientists have hesitated to accept the claims of success at face value.

Severe storms

Hurricanes can cause widespread destruction and human misery. An average hurricane has tremendous energy. In one day the energy released is about 1.6 × 10¹³ kilowatt-hours, or at least 8,000 times more than the electrical power generated each day in the United States. This quantity is equivalent to a daily explosion of 500,000 atomic bombs of the 20-kiloton Nagasaki variety. These numbers should make it clear that it would be impractical to attempt to modify hurricanes by a brute force approach. It is necessary to find a means whereby a small input of energy may upset a natural instability and lead to large results. Ice-nuclei seeding is one such approach that has been investigated in the past.

The first hurricane-seeding test was carried out in 1947 by Irving Langmuir and his colleagues, who distributed about 91 kilograms of crushed dry ice in a storm. They apparently were convinced that the seeding caused a change in the track followed by the storm.

On Aug. 18 and 20, 1969, Hurricane Debbie was seeded as a part of Project Stormfury, a series of hurricane-modification experiments conducted by the Environmental Science Services Administration and the U.S. Navy. Heavy doses of silver iodide were dropped into the hurricane clouds from airplanes. The maximum measured wind speeds in the hurricane decreased by 31 and 15 percent on the two seeded days. On August 19, the day between the two flights, the storm reportedly reintensified.

The results of this experiment were in the direction predicted by a mathematical model of a hypothetical hurricane. Because the measured winds in two hurricanes seeded in earlier years also decreased, Project Stormfury scientists were optimistic that hurricanes could be modified beneficially. Later studies, however, suggested that storm intensifications were part of natural cycles. Project Stormfury was discontinued in 1983, and there are no programs in hurricane modification currently active.

The violent nature of tornadoes would appear to dictate substantial programs of research to increase our understanding and control of these storms. In fact, very little scientific attention has been devoted to attempts to modify tornadoes. It had been speculated that they might be influenced by firing rockets into them and distributing materials to modify their temperature structure or electrical properties. Unfortunately, so little is known about the tornadoes that few scientists have confidence that such schemes would be effective.