What happened to the idea of seeding hurricanes to weaken them?
During the 1960s the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tried a more sophisticated way of making hurricanes weaker. This research was known as Project Stormfury. The basic idea was to seed clouds just outside the eye wall with silver iodide. The silver iodide, which is widely used in cloud seeding, encourages supercooled water – water that’s colder than 32 degrees F but is liquid, not ice – to freeze. This releases latent heat, which would make the clouds grow, stealing some of the humid air that’s helping the eye wall clouds grow and create strong winds. This seemed to work with Hurricane Beulah in 1963 and Hurricane Debbie in 1969. But, scientists had no way of knowing whether these two storms would have weakened any way at that time. Hurricanes often weaken and then regain strength naturally. Also, since the 1980s researchers have found that most hurricanes don’t have enough supercooled water for seeding to work. Concerns were also raised that t
