Page 168 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

north of the Schenectady airport, where the team was based. Under the auspices
of Project Cirrus, Langmuir consulted with cloud seeders in Central America and
corresponded with cloud seeders in Hawaii who were seeking to generate rainfall
from warm convective clouds. This stimulated Langmuir’s thinking about pos-
sible chain reactions in cumulus clouds seeded by as little as a single drop of water.
Although the Project Cirrus staff collected and analyzed mountains of photo-
graphic and other data, the response of the atmosphere to seeding was erratic and
the researchers could not obtain any definitive measures of the efficacy of artifi-
cial nucleating agents. The results from several experimental runs were spectacular,
however, and the Department of Defense decided to expand the work of Project
Cirrus to include rain enhancement experiments in New Mexico, forest fire sup-
pression trials in New England, liquid water seeding of warm clouds in Puerto
Rico, and hurricane modification in the Atlantic ocean. 44
one parallel study, the joint Air Force–Weather Bureau Cloud Physics
Research Project, found that seeding did indeed produce striking visual changes
in clouds, including dissipation of cold stratus decks. However, experiments with
clouds over ohio in 1948 and over California and the Gulf states in 1949 led the
researchers to conclude that cloud seeding could not initiate self-propagating
storms or relieve drought. The weather bureau spent $85,000 on the project in
1948 and $100,000 in 1949, with the air force supplying aircraft, personnel, and
ground radar facilities. 45

Hurricane king

In october 1947, GE announced that Project Cirrus would be intercepting a
hurricane, not to “bust” it but to experiment on the effects of seeding with dry
ice on a portion of a storm. Atlantic tropical storm number eight, unofficially
dubbed Hurricane King, had just made a devastating pass over southern Florida
and was churning in the Atlantic ocean about 400 miles northeast of orlando.
It was expected to head farther out to sea. on october 13, the Project Cirrus
team, led by navy lieutenant commander Daniel Rex and accompanied by Schae-
fer, bombed the heart of the storm with 80 pounds of dry ice and dropped 100
pounds more into two embedded convective towers.
The newspapers initially reported that the task force had “attacked” the storm
in a “hurricane-busting” effort to reduce its winds or redirect it. It was reported
in the press as “history’s first assault by man on a tropical storm,” an experiment
46
with energies of nature far greater than those unleashed by the atomic bomb.
The official results were classified as military secrets, and Schaefer told the press

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