Weather Control The “Pay-Off”

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30410, 8 April 1964, Page 16

Weather Control The “Pay-Off”

Control of the weather will be “the big pay-off” from tremendous advances for which scientists are now poised, said Dr. E. G. Droessler, programme director for atmospheric sciences in the United States National Science Foundation last evening. He said positive prediction of the weather, now coming near, plus its control by natural and artificial means, could change the face of the earth and life upon it. “For the first time students of the atmosphere can begin to describe it with accuracy and, on that basis, begin experiments in a vast new field,” Dr. Droessler said. “Radar, rockets, and satellites have given simply marvellous results. From these we may foresee a new balance in nature. “One promising prospect is the creation of hundreds of square miles of high-altitude

cirro-stratus cloud which Would balance the energy coming from the sun and being reflected back. Yon know the effect of a cloud across the sun when you are at the beach. You can see it, you can feel it, and you can imagine other effects,” he said. “Imagine,” said Dr. Droessler, “being able to put a big cloud over arid areas and even provide rain.” He said he did not mean cloud seeding. It was a matter of putting water in the right layers at the right time where it would freeze into cirrus cloud like the longlasting contrails of high-flying jet aircraft. Already this could be done on a minor scale. “The possibilities make the atmospheric science the most exciting field for a young scientist to enter today,” said Dr. Droessler. He admitted that he is a meteorologist and perhaps a little biased. Dr. Droessler is in Christchurch to inspect the research, work of Dr. J. B. Gregory, senior lecturer in physics at the University of Canterbury, which is being financed by the National Science Foundation. “Dr. Gregory is an imaginative and gifted scientist with

original ideas,” said Dr. Droessler. “That is why he won our support in competition with the best scientists in the United States. Our grants are made on excellence.”

Dr. Gregory’s radar research on the upper atmosphere was based on “hunches” about its constituents and behaviour which seemed well on the way to being proven. In checking “events” in the upper atmosphere and ascertaining whether they were transmitted lower down, Dr. Gregory might well be pioneering fresh fields. Dr. Droessler said he knew of nobody elsewhere engaged in quite the same line of research and this could be of enormous significance. It would be unfair to reveal more until Dr. Gregory published his results. This work, said Dr. Droessler, was one part of atmospheric science, “a new mix”

of physics, meteorology, climatology, and research engineering in which the United States now led the world, both in educational and scientific efforts. The combination of disciplines had exceedingly profitable results.

These scientists and others were studying the whole earth and its whole environment and this required the combined skills of the mathematician, the physicist, the chemist, and many others. The University of Canterbury project at Birdlings Flat, which he inspected, had its own example of co-opera-tion—physicists probing more than 100 miles up with radar designed and constructed in its own Industrial Development Department. “To import such gear you would really have paid through the nose,” said Dr. Droessler.