16 OCEANOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED STATES 



Mr. Oliver. This is what I had reference to. I was wondering 

 if this is really a serious and critical situation so far as your work is- 

 concerned? 



Mr. Reichelderfer. Yes, it is. It is very serious, 



Mr. Oliver. I expect that your requests were reasonably modest 

 in terms of what the needs are. 



Mr. Reichelderfer. The Weather Bureau has a tradition of 

 being pretty modest in its requests. We have been criticized very 

 much by another branch of the family for not asking for a great deal 

 more. We try to keep our requests very factual and only ask for 

 what we can use wisely. 



Mr. Oliver. Over the past 10 years, for example, have your requests- 

 for funds expanded substantially? 



Are you in a position to tell us? 



Mr. Reichelderfer. Yes; they have in this respect: CongresS' 

 has been very generous and at times has given us more than the' 

 budget asked for. Percentagewise we have increased in the past 10) 

 years from something of the order of $30 million or $25 million per 

 year to the order of $45 million, so that the percentage increase has 

 been large. 



Of course, the science and its possibilities have been increasing 

 much faster than this would indicate. 



Mr. Oliver. Assuming that you were able to expand your opera- 

 tions by reason of a more generous appropriation, you could use the- 

 money to advantage, could you, in terms of personnel and your opera- 

 tions generally? 



Mr. Reichelderfer. Yes; our estimates have been kept well 

 within the practical limitations. We could carr}^ out effectively all 

 that we have asked for. 



Mr. Oliver. Assuming tliat in the next 10 years you made great 

 strides and progress as we all hope you will, I am sure, and you get 

 the information, the data which will support the information indicat- 

 ing that there is some way to meet some of these complications of 

 weather, is there any possibility that you could do something about 

 breaking up, for example, a hurricane formation? 



Mr. Reichelderfer. Control? The only honest answer is to say 

 we do not know. This subject has been a difficult one because in some 

 of the earlier tests some wrong conclusions were drawn and claims 

 were published which misled everybody, unintentionally I am sure. 

 There is no doubt that there are some possibilities in weather control. 

 In fact, in a very small measure, we are controlling the weather 

 when we use burners, heaters in orchards to raise the temperature. 



Some of our people have hypotheses which indicate that the hurri- 

 cane might be deflected. This is pure conjecture but it is so important 

 that it is worth seeing what can be done. 



We are also very much interested in knowing whether anything 

 can be done with respect to controlling severe thunderstorms and 

 tornadoes. One can visualize ways in which these might be detected 

 right at their start and might be prevented from reaching the strength 

 that they do now. Certainly we need to know a great deal inore 

 about them before we will know where the Achilles' heel is. We do 

 not know just wluit particular parts are vulnerable to artificial or 

 external forces. 



