Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [91]
The military, or at least the Air Force Reserve, still operates Recon 53, the Hurricane Hunters, but most reconnaissance monitoring has been turned over to the Hurricane Research Program within the weather bureau. Most flights are now arranged through NOAA's Aircraft Operations Center, based in MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, which tracks hurricanes, monitors air quality, surveys whale populations, measures snow cover, and performs many other tasks.29
In the 1950s, the same decade that his military and political masters blithely sent Max Kozak into the heart of a nuclear fireball, anything seemed possible to science. If they could tame the atom, why, hurricanes and tornadoes should be a snap. Weather control, the notion of bringing planetary weather under the benign direction of the disinterested, politically neutral weather bureau, was in the air, so to speak, a refugee from the hoariest tales of science fiction. In the old days, rainmakers did dances and made incantations and sacrificed fowl or lambs or, occasionally, their virgin daughters, to the weather gods to make things happen. Modern science was beyond that. You should only have to understand what makes the great storms tick to know how to make the ticking stop.
A sample of this thinking is from Irving Langmuir, a meteorologist who headed a cloud-seeding project known as Project Cirrus: "We need to know enormously more than we do at present about hurricanes . . . [but] I think that, with increased knowledge, we should be able to abolish the evil effects of these hurricanes."30 Amateurs enthusiastically joined in the hunt for the magic technology that would do the trick, and more or less loony suggestions ranged from firing artillery through their tops to disrupt the rotation, to using giant fans to divert them, to flying hundreds of propeller aircraft against their rotation to unwind them, a device used to good effect by Superman in one of the Christopher Reeves movies to unwind time. Perhaps you could cool the ocean by towing into place massive Antarctic icebergs? Or by laying a cooling filament on the ocean surface? In Max Kozak's time, plans were mooted to see if a hurricane could be blown apart by a nuclear explosion; before it could be tested, wiser heads prevailed, suggesting that the added heat might actually intensify a hurricane, and in any case, what about the dispersal of the consequent radiation?
The notion of cloud-seeding, though, persisted well into the 1960s. It had been proposed as early as 1947, when scientists working on problems associated with aircraft de-icing found, for example, that moisture could be bled from clouds by a number of chemical reactions. Frozen CO2, popularly known as dry ice, could turn water and ice into snow; silver iodide, for its part, could precipitate out supercooled droplets and cause rain. Both chemicals would have the effect of cooling down the furiously hot core of the hurricane, and perhaps calm it down. In the last few years of the 1940s, military planes ferried Project Cirrus scientists into the eyes of several storms, including one hurricane where they emptied canisters of silver iodide. To their delight, the hurricane began to disintegrate—but twelve hours later had reorganized and reenergized again. Worse, it had taken a sharp turn to the west, and ended up pounding Savannah, Georgia—the notion that they may have actually caused the turn made the Project Cirrus people blanch, even though they were assured it was a midlatitude ridge of high pressure that had really done the trick.
By the 1960s the