While our capabilities and understanding are growing, so are the dan- 

 gers. In some parts of the United States operational weather modification 

 has been carried out for nearly twenty years and operations are also being 

 carried out in many foreign lands. The results are often unrecorded or 

 unpublished. There is also increasing concern that man's activities inad- 

 vertently affect the weather and thereby modify the climate. The more 

 we have learned about deliberate weather modification, the more reason 

 we have to be concerned over the inadvertent efTects of various substances 

 now being released into the atmosphere. These effects can extend to the 

 global scale as well as being local in nature. 



The potential benefits from weather control and conscious climate modi- 

 fication are very large. So are the potential risks — particularly from inad- 

 vertent climate modification. Furthermore, any technique enabling man to 

 control large-scale phenomena necessarily raises grave social, legal, and 

 economic issues where effects extend across state and national boundaries. 

 There is still time to address these issues rationally before operational 

 weather modification grows at a pace which forces hasty moves. This op- 

 portunity should not be wasted, and NACOA believes that the time has 

 come to take action along several broad fronts. 



RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ACTION 



NACOA sees five areas in which action is required. 



• Legislation: Legislation to define rights and responsibilities of citizens, 

 the States, and the Federal Government is needed promptly. So is 

 legislation to define means for regulating and licensing private op- 

 erators, organizational responsibility in the Federal Government, and 

 above all, a sense of national purpose. More specifically, legislation 

 is needed to designate responsibility in ameliorating those weather dis- 

 turbances that produce public states of emergency, to establish the 

 procedures under which the Federal Government and its employees 

 may legitimately modify the weather, to define the rights and re- 

 sponsibilities of commercial weather modifiers, and to designate re- 

 sponsibility (probably Federal) for monitoring inadvertent weather 

 modification. Regulation is also badly needed, but the issue of separat- 

 ing the responsibility for regulation from promotion of operations, al- 

 ways delicate, deserves more study. 



• Research and Technology: Development of the technology by which 

 precipitation can be increased, decreased, and redistributed should be 

 hastened through increased funding for basic research in cloud physics 

 and the optical properties of particulates, for computer modeling, ex- 

 periment design and field work, and the development of remote- 

 sensing devices (e.g., satellites and Doppler radar). 



• Hurricanes: Research and development of the technology to mitigate 

 the effects of hurricanes should be accelerated. This may involve mov- 



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