The Present status and the promise of weather modification

Man's changing the weather primarily means doing something about clouds and precipitation. Some first questions to be asked then are: How do clouds form? How do they grow and dissipate? What is the precipitation mechanism and how is it triggered by nature? And what are the natural controls on cloud systems and severe storms? The answers to these questions and many more should be known quite well before man can seriously contemplate wide‐scale weather‐modification experiments. In fact, the answers to the above questions are almost completely unknown and yet man has been attempting weather modification down through the centuries in his search for economic gains, adventure, knowledge, and power.