LaConte: Cloud seeding and weather modification
It seems you can’t read about a hurricane modification conspiracy theory these days without Colorado being mentioned.
An Associated Press story from Oct. 8 is headlined “Control the path and power of hurricanes like Milton? Forget it.” The story shares pictures of devastation in the Southeast, but one image doesn’t seem to belong with the others: A man working on a utility box with a caption about cloud-seeding equipment being installed in Colorado.
The theory behind cloud seeding in the Rockies is simple: If we can create more snowy, slippery slopes for skiers, then more tourist dollars will flow.
But the if-then slippery slopes don’t stop there. The next one goes something like this: If we started weather modification experiments in the 1940s, then the technology must be really advanced by now. And before long, we’ve arrived at our local connection: If we’re modifying weather in public in Colorado, then we must also be modifying it secretly in Florida.
I use the term “in public” to describe Colorado’s cloud seeding because it’s a very public process involving public agencies and public funds. But the private sector (i.e., Vail Resorts) has long been involved, and it has a profit motive to seed clouds, so there is an inclination among some to ascribe a nefarious intent to the practice, which doesn’t help the larger perception of weather modification.
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And while cloud seeding in Colorado still happens as the result of public processes, in Vail it’s not quite as public as it used to be. I often find old cloud seeding stories when researching the Vail Daily’s Time Machine section; recently the Sept. 8 edition of Time Machine detailed a public negotiation that took place between the Vail Town Council and Vail Associates over cloud seeding in 1994.
Granted, it was 30 years ago, but it’s surprising to see how much information was disclosed from the private company at the time. Joe Macy with Vail Associates told the Town Council the company had 12 cloud seeding generators in Eagle County, and it used them starting Nov. 1 each season. He said cloud seeding, according to his calculations, could add “66 inches of additional snow if it’s done the entire season.”
Today, Vail and Beaver Creek have the unique distinction of possessing the only weather modification permit in Colorado assigned specifically to a ski resort. According to Colorado’s weather modification website, there are eight permitted weather modification programs in Colorado: the Central Colorado Mountains River Basin Program, the Upper Gunnison River Basin Program, the Grand Mesa Water Enhancement Authority, the San Juan Mountains Program, the North Platte Basin Airborne Cloud Seeding Project, the St. Vrain and Left Hand Program, and the Vail/Beaver Creek Program.
Vail started its program in 1977 after Gov. Richard Lamm suggested emergency cloud seeding programs could help with drought. Vail saw a 40% drop in skier visitation that season (another detail from Macy), and Lamm’s request came not long after Colorado had participated in the nation’s largest research effort into weather modification. That program was administered by the Bureau of Reclamation and went by the handle “Project Skywater,” a name which, again, doesn’t help with public perception.
“Sounds sort of like a top secret project for NASA or the CIA, doesn’t it?” said a writer for the Collegian student newspaper at CSU.
CSU was one of four schools to receive funds from Project Skywater along with the University of Wyoming, New Mexico State University, and the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
At a speech in Denver in 1966, U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall said the Bureau of Reclamation had been interested in weather modification since 1947, a year after Irving Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut of General Electric proved cloud seeding worked. If you’re wondering if Bernard Vonnegut is related to author Kurt Vonnegut, read “Cat’s Cradle,” Vonnegut’s novel about a substance that instantly freezes water. The substance is called Ice Nine, showcasing that even Vonnegut couldn’t come up with something as suspicious-sounding as Project Skywater.
While Project Skywater involved several Western states, the largest winter cloud-seeding program took place in Colorado starting in 1970. Meteorologists in Durango determined when the seeding should start, scientists in Denver examined how wind carried the cloud-seeding silver iodide into the atmosphere, contractors collected data at over 200 monitoring and testing sites, and scientists studied the soil for silver.
“Project Skywater designers hoped to integrate technologies and methods developed across the region into a national effort, but this was not to be,” according to the Bureau of Reclamation. “Moreover, Skywater never received the funding or congressional blessing that some supporters had hoped.”
Other parts of the program proved to be extremely controversial. The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology seeded clouds on June 9, 1972, and later that night the area experienced one of the deadliest floods in U.S. history, which killed 238 people.
A different storm system than the one that had been seeded caused the flood, said Project Meteorologist Alex Koscielski, and while that system did indeed absorb the seeded clouds, it was destined to cause a deluge with or without the seeding.
“It couldn’t have made a hill of beans of difference,” Koscielski said of the seeding.
While it’s usually best to listen to the scientists in those situations, one of the best takes at the time might have come from an economist. Following the South Dakota flood, James Crutchfield — a natural resource economic policy professor with the University of Washington — said when extreme weather events “are occurring close enough to the weather modification as to raise the possibility of a cause-and-effect relationship, there is serious questions in my mind as to whether we ought to be fooling around with it at all.”
As we’re now seeing in Colorado, those extreme weather events don’t even have to be close to weather modification areas for people to raise the possibility of a cause-and-effect relationship.
John LaConte is a reporter at the Vail Daily who authors the weekly Time Machine feature that runs on Mondays. Email him at jlaconte@vaildaily.com
