weather modification

Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use.

Would-be hurricane fighters hoping to stop a future Katrina before it makes landfall should aim to wound, not kill. The goal should be to re-route hurricanes and ease their fury, rather than try to stop them forming in the first place.

Improvements to methods of tracking and recording weather patterns finally make it possible to properly test technologies designed to alter them, say experts. Weather modification attempts to bring rain to dry areas, or divert storms. But decades of tests have generated only heated arguments and even lawsuits. All techniques developed so far are essentially unproven. But new weather tracking technology can change that, said delegates at an American Meteorological Society meeting on weather modification this week.

To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

A recently-unearthed U.S. Navy research project calls for creating mad-made floods and droughts to "disrupt [the] economy" of an enemy state.

For the first time in several years, Eastern Idaho is experimenting with a cloud seeding program this winter. That's when iodized crystals are shot into clouds to produce snow.

China has succeeded in creating another man-made snowfall in Tibet Autonomous Region to ease drought, local authorities said on Tuesday.

Weather modification activities have been going on in North Dakota more than 50 years, but an element of the population remains skeptical about the benefits of altering an approaching storm.