The one-two hurricane punch from Katrina and Wilma along with predictions of more severe weather in the future has scientists pondering ways to save lives, protect property and possibly even control the weather.

While efforts to tame storms have so far been clouded by failure, some researchers aren’t willing to give up the fight. And even if changing the weather proves overly challenging, residents and disaster officials can do a better job planning and reacting.

In fact, military officials and weather modification experts could be on the verge of joining forces to better gauge, react to, and possibly nullify future hostile forces churned out by Mother Nature.

While some consider the idea farfetched, some military tacticians have already pondered ways to turn weather into a weapon.
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The use of space-based equipment to assist in clean-up operations — with a look toward future prospects — was recently noted by General Lance Lord, Commander, Air Force Space Command at an October 20th Pacific Space Leadership Forum in Hawaii.

“We saw first hand the common need for space after the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean,” Lord said. “Natural disasters don’t respect international boundaries. Space capabilities were leveraged immediately after the tsunami to help in the search and rescue effort…but what about before the disaster?”

Lord said that an even better situation is to have predicted the coming disaster and warned those in harm’s way. “No matter what your flag or where you waive it from…the possibility of saving hundreds of thousands of people is a mandate to continually improve,” he advised.

The U.S. Air Force is also looking at ways to make satellites and satellite launches cheaper and also reduce the amount of time it takes to launch into space from months to weeks to days and hours, Lord said. Having that capability will increase responsiveness to international needs, he said, such as the ability to send up a satellite to help collect information and enhance communications when dealing with international disasters.
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On the other hand, Air Force 2025 was a study that complied with a directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force “to examine the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future.”

“Current technologies that will mature over the next 30 years will offer anyone who has the necessary resources the ability to modify weather patterns and their corresponding effects, at least on the local scale,” the authors of the report explained. “Current demographic, economic, and environmental trends will create global stresses that provide the impetus necessary for many countries or groups to turn this weather-modification ability into a capability.”
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In 2025, the report summarized, U.S. aerospace forces can “own the weather” by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications.

“Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures,” the report concluded.
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Another reason for embarking on this new science could be to make sure inadvertent effects of existing projects, such as the heating of the ionosphere and modifications of the polar electrojet, are not having effects on weather, Eastlund stated.

As example, Eastlund pointed to the High frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). This is a major Arctic facility for upper atmospheric and solar-terrestrial research, being built on a Department of Defense-owned site near Gakona, Alaska.

Eastlund wonders if HAARP does, in fact, generate gravity waves. If so, can those waves in turn influence severe weather systems?

Started in 1990, the unclassified HAARP program is jointly managed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research. Researchers at the site make use of a high-power ionospheric research instrument to temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere for scientific study, observing and measuring the excited region using a suite of devices.

The fundamental goal of research conducted at the facility is to study and understand natural phenomena occurring in the Earth’s ionosphere and near-space environment. According to the HAARP website, those scientific investigations will have major value in the design of future communication and navigation systems for both military and civilian use.
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The last large hurricane modification experiments — under Project Stormfury — were carried out by the U.S. Air Force, Eastlund said. “It is likely the Department of Defense would be the lead agency in any new efforts in severe storm modification.”

Additionally, federal laboratories with their extensive computational modeling skills would also play a lead role in the development of a science of weather modification. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would find their respective niches too. The satellite diagnostic capabilities in those agencies would play a strong role, Eastlund suggested.

It appears that only modest amounts of government dollars have been spent on weather modification over the last five years.

“Hurricane Katrina could cost $300 billion by itself,” Eastlund said. “In my opinion, it is time for a serious scientific effort in weather modification.”

“Global warming appears to be a reality, and records could continue to fall in the hurricane severity sweepstakes,” Eastlund said. “When I first suggested the use of space-based assets for the prevention of tornadoes, many people expressed their displeasure with ‘messing with Mother Nature’. I still remember hiding in the closet of our house in Houston as a tornado passed overhead. It is time for serious, controlled research, with the emphasis on safety, for the good of mankind,” he concluded.

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