These awesome and ominous cloudscapes show the untamable power of nature
Documenting the U.S. government’s failed efforts to control hurricanes
Georgians were pissed at the government after the Cape Sable hurricane slammed into Savannah in 1947. The storm was headed into the Atlantic before scientists dumped about 200 pounds of crushed dry ice into its clouds. The cyclone slowed, then reversed course and slammed into the coast. Project Cirrus, as the operation was known, was cancelled after its one and only field test.
Historical records and observations made during the flight eventually exonerated the General Electric Research Laboratory-military partnership behind Project Cirrus, but attitudes toward further experiments remained cool for years. Everyone wanted a way to prevent natural disasters, but no one was convinced that the government wouldn’t accidentally make them worse. After meteorologists with the National Hurricane Research Project developed a convincing understanding of how hurricanes worked — and more than a decade after the Cape Sable hurricane — Project Stormfury was launched to see whether silver iodide could cause supercooled water inside a hurricane to form ice crystals, breaking down and replacing a cyclone’s eyewall with a larger, slower vortex.
But 1963’s Hurricane Beulah proved nothing. The eyewall was poorly formed and scientists trying to seed it missed their mark. Their aim improved on a second attempt, and the original eyewall gave way to a larger, slower one with a 20 percent reduction in wind speed. Still, the results were inconclusive. There wasn’t another well-defined hurricane far enough from land but close enough for planes until Hurricane Debbie swirled into the Atlantic in 1969. Thirteen planes attacked, now firing rocket propelled canisters of silver iodide instead of dumping it by hand. Their first pass saw a 31 percent reduction in wind speed. A second seeding two days later saw an 18 percent drop. Everything was taking shape—except for new hurricanes for new experiments.
Diehards pushed to relocate Project Stormfury to Guam, but China and Japan pushed back. The downtime proved useful, although in a roundabout way. Research flights and storm-tracking sorties collected evidence that large storms developed second eyewalls on their own. Worse yet, new data found that hurricanes contained little supercooled water, the very substance silver iodide needed to interact with to destabilize a hurricane. Functionally dead, Stormfury was officially laid to rest in 1983.
