Weather Modification to Fight Hurricanes

The Washington Post yesterday carried a story, "One Researcher's Plan: Fight Storms With Storms", which began:

"Moshe Alamaro has a modest proposal. Get a fleet of ocean barges and mount 10 or 20 jet engines -- tails up -- on each one. Fill the barges with aviation fuel and tow them into the path of an oncoming hurricane. Light off the jets.

If everything goes as planned, the jets will trigger small tropical storms, 'like backfires,' Alamaro says, marginally lowering the surface ocean temperature and depriving the real hurricane of energy as it gets closer to shore."

I think there is a history to such attempts. Thus, in 1947, according to a story I found on the Internet,

"the U.S. Military (as part of Project Cirrus involving General Electric) dropped 80 kg of dry ice into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean, safely off the eastern coast of the USA. The hurricane changed direction and traveled inland, where it did extensive damage to property in Georgia."

At the time, little was published about the experiment, perhaps to protect the organizations involved from law suits. Those who conducted the experiment thought the seeding caused a change in direction; later published analysis doubted the cause-effect relation.

Project Stormfury, operated by the U.S. Government, used cloud seeding techniques on four hurricanes (eight days total) from 1961 to 1971. The researchers hoped to slow the maximum wind velocity in the cloud wall. The outcomes were mixed, and subsequent analysis was not taken to support the hypothesis that such seeding could weaken hurricanes.

I don't find any written sources, but my memory (faulty as it is) suggests that there was a ban on government experiments on weather modification, and that I was told that the ban stemmed from Project Stormfury. As I recall, one of the seeded hurricanes changed course in the Caribbean, and eventually made landfall and did damage (perhaps Hurricane Ginger in 1971?). The story I heard was that the State Department, seeking to avoid any future international incident, imposed a (long lasting) total ban on U.S. financing of weather modification research that could affect another nation.

In 1998 the American Meteorological Society published a formal policy document, which I believe still represents the consensus of the professional community, saying:

No sound physical hypotheses exist for the modification of hurricanes, tornadoes, or damaging winds in general, and no related scientific experimentation has been conducted in the past 20 years.