Weather Control?

In the technological millennium that scientists have promised civilization after the war, Professor Albert Eide Parr, director of the American Museum of Natural History, believes that at last something can be done about the weather. He thinks that cities can be planned with built-in climate control.

Addressing the graduating class at University of Chicago's Institute of Meteorology, Professor Parr observed indignantly that scientists have done practically nothing about the weather. "Our relations to the forces of weather and climate," said he, "are still in the most primitive cultural stage."

Oceanographer Parr's own ideas on climate control are still in a sketchy stage, but he offered meteorologists a few provocative suggestions: they might "create a city of calm in a windy location" by means of windbreaks and shelterbelt planting, cool or warm a city by the use of "heat-generating or light-reflecting facades in city building," control the effects of the sun by intelligent planning of light and shadow.

Unknown Elements. But the most eminent U.S. meteorologist, Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby, head of Chicago's Institute, smiled skeptically at these notions. Said he: "There's too much of the popular science approach to the geophysical sciences in the U.S. We are far behind Scandinavia, where these sciences are most advanced, because we think in terms of controlling chemicals in a laboratory. We should try instead to establish a delicate balance between man and his environment."

Rossby agrees with Professor Parr that no one knows much about weather; meteorologists still have no precise idea, for example, why some clouds drop rain and others do not. But Carl Rossby, a moon faced, jolly Swede, has turned up many another useful fact about weather since he arrived in the U.S. and went to work for the Weather Bureau in 1926.

Rossby changed U.S. weather forecasting by using upper-air soundings instead of relying only on surface readings of temperature, pressure and humidity. At M.I.T., where in 1928 he launched the first U.S. meteorology school and trained weather experts for aviation, he started the first regular weather observation nights in the U.S. He found that an air mass retains the same specific humidity and potential temperature throughout its journey from the polar to the temperate zone. Result was more accurate forecasting over longer ranges; the U.S. Weather Bureau began to issue five-day forecasts, is steadily extending the span.*

Back to Nature. Meteorologist Rossby believes that war stimulates progress in meteorology, but he expects no miracles after World War II. He urges that city planners study meteorology and meteorologists study city planning, but at best he thinks cities of the future may be made only a few degrees cooler in summer, a few degrees warmer in winter. The most practical step cities can now take toward weather control, says he, is to get rid of their smoke (perhaps by underground smoke tunnels). So doing, they would get more ultraviolet radiation, better visibility, fewer fogs, probably less rain.

*Chairman George Aiken of a Senate Agricultural Subcommittee.

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