Project Stormfury - After The Seedings

After The Seedings

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 aircraft 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.

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