FORECAST: A Weatherman in the Sky

August 1980. Perched on his polar-orbiting platform 200 miles above the earth, the Weatherman in the Sky begins a routine scan of the earth's surface. Beyond the green necklace of the Antilles, Hurricane Clytemnestra begins to collapse, shredded by a continuous aerial barrage of silver-iodide seeds from U.S. planes. The weatherman flashes Moscow that intense hail is due to fall on Irkutsk by early afternoon, and the Russians quickly send up rockets laden with chemicals, melting the hail before it lifts the wheat fields. As for more mundane matters, vacationers on Cape Cod will have a clammy morning--but only until 10:40 a.m. And the working girls in Chicago had better go to lunch plastic-headed: it will rain from 12:35 to 2:15.

THE scene is not science fiction. Storm-spotting sensors and the micrometeorological predictions of an orbiting weatherman are well within the reach of today's technology, giving man for the first time in his history the tools at least to tame, if not to conquer, the weather. Weather research has experienced a breakthrough in the past few years, and scientists around the world are rushing to take advantage of what the National Academy of Sciences calls "this new and enormous power to influence the conditions of human life." This year alone the U.S. Government has published some 1,700 pages of hard, scientific findings on weather modification. The National Academy has recommended a sixfold increase in such research by 1970, and President Johnson has called for "new strides toward coping with the historic enemies, storm and drought and flood."

Sun, Wind & Orbit

The dream of weather control emerged with man from the cave, but for most of humanity's existence it has remained only a dream. Primitive man made sacrifices to the elements, often in human blood, and the Greeks made gods of weather's components: Typhon, Zephyros, Apollo. Beginning with the Greek Philosopher Eratosthenes (276-194 B.C.), who correctly surmised that climate was generated by solar radiation, there have been thousands of efforts at influencing weather. Now that man is approaching the stage at which some control is possible, the question is not just how he can exert his influence but how far he should go in pressing changes whose consequences still remain hidden.

Man has, of course, already altered some of the weather's effects to his advantage. He has air-conditioned many of his edifices, and such projects as Houston's Astrodome suggest that he will go much farther. His new vehicles, amid the general advance in knowledge of meteorology, are the creations of modern technology, particularly electronic-eyed weather satellites like Tiros and Nimbus and high-speed computers that can digest and interpret weather data.

In the U.S.'s boldest single weather-control project, Project Stormfury, the Navy is now trying to prove that hurricanes can be steered or wiped out by seeding their centers with silver-iodide crystals. Russian antiaircraft cannons regularly bark over the mountains of Georgia and the hail-blasted steppes of Siberia, pumping tons of silver iodide into the sky at intervals of ten to 15 minutes until storms subside. In France, Meteorologist Henri Dessens has created le Meteotron, a superstove that covers 3,200 square meters and has 100 burners that can generate 700,000 kilowatts of power to send cumulo-nimbuses tumbling into the sky, frequently to spill rain. Snow has been seeded in the California High Sierra, and airports have dissipated fog with dry ice. As the American Meteorological Society put it earlier this year: "Weather modification today is a reality."

Before man makes significantly greater strides in influencing weather, he must learn to predict it more accurately. The satellites are proving vastly helpful in this task by photographing huge areas of the earth and its atmosphere, and computers have made it possible to handle and evaluate data fast enough to predict weather accurately for days in advance. Because far more information about the weather is still needed, the World Meteorological Organization will next year inaugurate a "World Weather Watch" using Tiros and Nimbus satellites and a network of 250 land and sea stations. Even more accurate observation is envisioned by U.S. Physicist Peter Castruccio, director of IBM's Advanced Space Programs, who suggests a follow-on to the Apollo program that would place weathermen in the sky along with two unmanned platforms equipped with complex weather-probing devices.

Need for Wisdom

Once man knows more precisely just what the weather is going to do and where, he can not only prepare for it but bring to bear his modern tools to dissipate its force, change its course or moderate its impact. Silver-iodide seeding has revived its once-faltering reputation, and many future plans revolve around seeding everything from tornadoes to typhoons. The Soviets are testing sound as a possible way to disperse fog, have even suggested damming the Bering Strait to make the Arctic warmer. Several countries have suggested melting part of the icecap by coating it with heat-absorbing carbon. U.S. scientists are considering the possibility of generating dust clouds in space to form sunshades, or creating broad bands of ice-crystal cirrus clouds that would allow the ground beneath to cool.

Though most such ideas are technically feasible, they will occur far in the future--if at all. One reason for this is that man is not quite sure what will happen if he tampers too much with natural forces. Since the atmosphere is an ecological container analogous to a Gemini capsule, any major change in the weather at one place is bound to affect the whole worldwide weather system. To destroy a typhoon threatening Kyushu might deprive a drought-ridden corner of India of needed rain or even parch Eastern Europe. To melt the icecap would almost certainly inundate much of the U.S. seaboard. Thus the masters of controlled weather would have to make sticky international and intranational decisions about which areas would get the good effects and which the bad.

Since hurricanes, for example, carry enormous excess energy and heat from their breeding grounds in the equatorial zone--a single eye can contain the power of 150 H-bombs--no one knows what would happen if they were prevented by artificial means from forming. Italian Meteorologist Giorgio Fea suspects that any tampering might produce "thermal imbalances so violent that even the great Biblical events would pale beside them." Scientists are already using computers to set up atmospheric models on which the effects of such man-made weather changes can be calculated in advance, but it will take another generation or two of more sophisticated computers for them to be certain whether the changes will help or hurt mankind.

Man will certainly learn in the years ahead to moderate and modulate his weather, with all that means for his health, his convenience and his business, but the serious question remains about just how far he should go. Psychiatrists insist that man has a built-in need for variety and for the unexpected (Southern California notwithstanding), fear that total weather control might upset both his creativity and his memory. In approaching weather control, says Dr. Walter Orr Roberts, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, "a great deal of wisdom will be required." Indeed, the scientific problems of influencing the weather could eventually prove less difficult than the human problems of how to use that control in man's best interest.

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