It turns out that, as the state press explains today, "The municipal weather modification office used artificial means to increase the snow in order to ease the lingering drought".
True, the municipal Weather Modification Office has been blasting the clouds with silver-iodide artillery shells to help the rain along, but the lush plant growth is comforting anyway.
He is currently working on a book about the history of military weather modification and the future of global climate engineering.
For Dr. Fleming, whose book is a scholarly look at the history of weather modification and similar efforts, geoengineering proposals are "untested, untestable and dangerous beyond belief".
Tom Henderson, who runs a cloud-seeding company called Atmospherics and sits on the American Meteorological Society's weather modification committee, says that enthusiasm for research into rainfall-enhancement tends to ebb and flow with the availability of water.
fruit growers in Penn., W. Virginia, & Maryland, & a group of truck farmers in Ayr Township, Fulton County, Penn., who had formed an organization called the Bl ridge Weather Modification Ass'n., & in '63 hired Dr. Wallac E. Howell, of Bedford, Mass .to seed nearby thunder clouds before they reached hail-producing intensity.
Jeff Tilley, the Director of Weather Modification Activities at DRI (yes, apparently that's a real job title), explained to AccuWeather why current cloud seeding methods need to be adjusted: .
Reconstructed snowpack (April 1st snow water equivalent (SWE)) for the UGRB will provide information on the long-term variability of snowpack and assist in determining the effectiveness of current weather modification efforts.
Drought-stricken Beijing, whose winter snows have all but vanished in the last 25 years, received perhaps three inches of flakes last week, the result, the government said, of its weather modification efforts.
The effects of inadvertent weather modification may pose serious threats to many aspects of civilization, including ecosystems, natural resources, food and fiber production, economic development, and human health.
