On September 16, 1961, a specially modified DC-6 propellor plane flew into the swirling, battering winds of Hurricane Esther over the Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of hours, the pilots urged the plane closer to the center of the storm as technicians jettisoned eight canisters of silver iodide into the eyewall, the point where the strongest winds of the storm create a barrier of cloud and rain. As the theory went, the silver iodide would force ice crystals to form among the supercooled water in the cloud wall, changing its composition and lessening wind speeds throughout the storm. The accompanying planes in the fleet recorded a 10% reduction in wind speeds that day, enough to consider the experiment a success and push forward in the creation of Project Stormfury, a fantastically-named, multi-agency government project aimed at assessing the possibility of controlling the weather.
Hurricane Esther wasn’t the first time the government had tried to change the course of a major storm. In 1947, a plane from Project Cirrus, a joint venture of General Electric and the Air Force, flew into a hurricane and dumped hundreds of pounds of dry ice into the clouds. While the scientists of Project Cirrus noted a major difference in the cloud behavior, things didn’t go very well. The hurricane, which had been headed out to sea, abruptly changed direction and made landfall in Georgia. Cirrus had been no secret project, and so the public immediately jumped to blame the cloud seeding efforts for the hurricane’s rapid heading change. While notables argued both for and against this possibility, the project was shut down and the prospect of weather modification took a back seat for the next decade in the face of public scrutiny.
After enough time out of the spotlight and with the positive results from Hurricane Esther, Project Stormfury could begin in earnest to test the prospects of cloud seeding for weather modification. With satellites still in their infancy the project relied heavily on aircraft observation of weather conditions. Every time Stormfury attempted to modify a storm they flew with a posse of planes including a B-57 reconnaissance jet, a modified DC-6, a C-130 Hercules, and a U-2 spy plane for high-level photography of the storm system. This fleet constituted an aerial laboratory, carrying all the scientists, observers, and equipment necessary to facilitate the experiment and monitor the results.
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| One of the B-57s of Project Stormfury |
Stormfury got off to an encouraging start with the seeding of Hurricane Beulah, which resulted in shaky measurements but an observed reduction in wind speeds after seeding, however this would be the last encouraging test for some time. Due to general wariness of weather modification and the memories of Project Cirrus, strict criteria were laid out for the types of storms with which Stormfury was allowed to interact. They had to have a less than 1 in 10 chance of making landfall within the next day, be of a certain size with a well-defined eyewall, and have strong and sustained winds. Most importantly, they had to be within range of the aerial fleet. This confluence of factors, plus unreliable and experimental instruments and equipment, led to extremely infrequent opportunities to seed hurricanes. No storms were seeded between the successful Beulah mission in 1963 and Hurricane Debbie in 1969.
The experimentation on Debbie was again encouraging, but Stormfury could never achieve true success the way the program was structured. With such stringent restrictions on the types of storms they could experiment with, they would never achieve a large enough data set to statistically prove they'd had an actual effect. The most confounding evidence came when Stormfury flew missions to study storms without seeding. They found that hurricanes are capricious and their wind speeds often fluctuate up and down with nearly no notice. Stormfury could never be certain that a storm was changing because of their efforts, or because the storm was just changing. The project carried on into the 1980's with a drastically reduced budget, and was eventually closed down.
While Project Stormfury was a failure, and the U.S. Government never found a way to stop dangerous storms, it is important that we remember there was a time when our government was willing to participate in such hopeful and bullish projects. America was focused on achieving the world of tomorrow, and no concept was too far out to consider. This bold optimism led us into the hearts of hurricanes, the basic building blocks of the human cell, and it was the same promise that took us to the stars. This desire to push the envelope, no matter how minimal the possibility of success, pushed us forward in ways no one could have imagined. Even though the optimism and the drive have faded, in some ways we are still riding the innovation wave of the 1950's.
