page_title: Project Stormfury
section_title: After the seedings
hierarchical_section_title: Project Stormfury / After the seedings
context_page_description: Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft into them and seeding with silver iodide. The project was run by the United States Government from 1962 to 1983. The hypothesis was that the silver iodide would cause supercooled water in the storm to freeze, disrupting the inner structure of the hurricane, and this led to seeding several Atlantic hurricanes. However, it was later shown that this hypothesis was incorrect. It was determined that most hurricanes do not contain enough supercooled water for cloud seeding to be effective. Additionally, researchers found that unseeded hurricanes often undergo the same structural changes that were expected from seeded hurricanes. This finding called Stormfury's successes into question, as the changes reported now had a natural explanation.
  The last experimental flight was flown in 1971, due to a lack of candidate storms and a changeover in NOAA's fleet. Project Stormfury was officially canceled more than a decade after the last modification experiment. Project Stormfury failed to reach its goal of reducing the destructiveness of hurricanes, but it was not without merit.
context_section_description: Atlantic hurricanes meeting all of the criteria were extremely rare, which made duplication of the "success" reached with Hurricane Debbie extremely difficult. Meanwhile, developments outside of meteorology hindered the cause of hurricane modification.
  In the early 1970s, the Navy withdrew from the project. Stormfury began to refocus its efforts on understanding, rather than modifying, tropical cyclones. At the same time, the Project's B-17s were nearing the end of their operational lifetimes. At the cost of $30 million (year unknown) two Lockheed P-3's were acquired. Due to the rarity of Atlantic hurricanes meeting the safety requirements, plans were made to move Stormfury to the Pacific and experiment on the large number of typhoons there. This action required many of the same safety requirements as in the Atlantic, but had the advantage of a much higher number of potential subjects.
  The plan was to begin again in 1976, and seed typhoons by flying out of Guam. However, political issues blocked the plan. The People's Republic of China announced that it would not be happy if a seeded typhoon changed course and made landfall on its shores, while Japan declared itself willing to put up with difficulties caused by typhoons because that country got more than half of its rainfall from tropical cyclones.
  Similar plans to operate Stormfury in the eastern north Pacific or in the Australian region also collapsed.
caption: Stormfury inside Tropical Storm Dorothy
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