Project Stormfury
Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft into them and seeding them with silver iodide.
The last experimental flight was flown in 1971, due to a lack of candidate storms and a changeover in NOAA's fleet.
After witnessing the artificial creation of ice crystals, Langmuir became an enthusiastic proponent of weather modification.
[1] Schaefer found that when he dumped crushed dry ice into a cloud, precipitation in the form of snow resulted.
[2] With regard to hurricanes, it was hypothesized that by seeding the area around the eyewall with silver iodide, latent heat would be released.
[4] Due to Langmuir's efforts, and the research of Schaefer at General Electric, the concept of using cloud seeding to weaken hurricanes gathered momentum.
Schaefer and Langmuir assisted the U.S. military as advisors for Project Cirrus, the first large study of cloud physics and weather modification.
It was a collaboration of the General Electric Corporation, the US Army Signal Corps, the Office of Naval Research, and the US Air Force.
[5] The project's two B-17s and a B-29 of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance group were dispatched from MacDill Field, Florida, to intercept the hurricane.
[7] The seeding B-17 flew along the rainbands of the hurricane, and dropped nearly 180 pounds (82 kilograms) of crushed dry ice into the clouds.
The public blamed the seeding, and Irving Langmuir claimed that the reversal had been caused by human intervention.
Only the fact that a system in 1906 had taken a similar path, as well as evidence showing that the storm had already begun to turn when seeding began, ended the litigation.
According to the September 12, 1965 edition of the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, in 1947 a hurricane "went whacky" and "Twelve years later it was admitted the storm had in fact been seeded.
[5] The first seeding experiment since the Cirrus disaster was attempted on September 16, 1961, into Hurricane Esther by NHRP and the United States Navy aircraft.
Eight cylinders of silver iodide were dropped into Esther's eyewall, and winds were recorded as weakening by 10 percent.
A Department of Defense research activity supported by the Advanced Research Project Agency, Project BATON sought to expand understanding of storm physics as an aid to weather forecasting, fire prevention, and, possibly, for artificially controlling the weather.
The hurricane had to have a less than 10 percent chance of approaching inhabited land within a day;[13] it had to be within range of the seeding aircraft; and it had to be a fairly intense storm with a well-formed eye.
[9] The primary effect of these criteria was to make possible seeding targets extremely rare.
In addition, mistakes were made, as the seedings of silver iodide were dropped in the wrong places.
[13] As Betsy passed close to the Bahamas and smashed into southern Florida, the public and Congress thought that seeding was underway and blamed Stormfury.
[13] It took two months for Stormfury officials to convince Congress that Betsy was not seeded, and the project was allowed to continue.
Due to the rarity of Atlantic hurricanes meeting the safety requirements, plans were made to move Stormfury to the Pacific and experiment on the large number of typhoons there.
[14] Similar plans to operate Stormfury in the eastern north Pacific or in the Australian region also collapsed.
[27] It remained unclear whether the seedings caused the secondary eyewalls or whether it was just part of a natural cycle[28] (because correlation does not imply causation).
It was initially thought that eyewall changes similar to those observed in seeded but not unseeded systems provided the evidence that Project Stormfury was a success.
[29] Data and observations did in fact begin to accumulate that debunked Stormfury's working hypothesis.
[30] Other observations in Hurricanes Anita, David, Frederic, and Allen[31] also discovered that tropical cyclones have very little supercooled water and a great deal of ice crystals.
[34] In the sense of weakening hurricanes to reduce their destructiveness, Project Stormfury was a complete failure because it did not distinguish between natural phenomena in tropical cyclones and the impact of human intervention.
In addition, the Lockheed P-3s were perfectly suitable for gathering data on tropical cyclones, allowing improved forecasting of these monstrous storms.
[37] Former Cuban president Fidel Castro alleged that Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaponize hurricanes.
