will lead to nationwide utilization of this most important of natural

resources.

S. 2875 takes nothing from any other Federal program. It emphasizes and retains in its proper place the duty of the Department of the Interior to conserve the natural resources of the Nation.

Senator ANDERSON. The first witness this morning is Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Mr. Secretary, we are pleased to have you back with us again.

STATEMENT OF HON. STEWART L. UDALL, SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR

Secretary UDALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a prepared statement. It is such a good statement I think I will read almost all of it. There may be a few ad libs if that is all right, Mr. Chairman. However, first, I should like to say, Mr. Chairman, that we sense in our Department with all of our wide-ranging water interests the development of a whole new wave of interest in water resources of which atmospheric water resources are of strategic importance.

I should like to say, too, that the Senator from New Mexico, who is presiding here today-probably more than any one man in the Congress has over the past two decades done more to push research programs that might lead to significant accomplishments. I think your efforts and the effort of others on this committee have brought us to the point where we are today.

I welcome this opportunity to be here on the first day of spring to present the views of the Department of the Interior on atmospheric water resources, and to give our strong support for the long-range objectives underlying S. 2875 as introduced by Senator Anderson and on behalf of 21 other Senators.

The long and shining list of sponsors of S. 2875 reminds me of what John Ruskin once said about the weather:

Sunshine is delicious,

Rain is refreshing,

Wind braces up,

Snow is exhilarating.

There is no such thing as bad weather

Only different kinds of good weather.

Two months ago, I spoke of the challenging horizons in atmospheric water resources in addressing the annual meeting in Denver of the American Meteorological Society. It was thoughtful of Senator Anderson to insert these remarks in the Congressional Record. I would also like to make the address a part of the record of these important historic hearings.

Senator ANDERSON. Without objection, it may be done, sir. It was a very fine address.

(The document referred to follows:)

WATER RESOURCES IN THE SKY

(By Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall)

Tonight I should like to approach the subject of weather modification by a somewhat circuitous route beginning, as does the whole hydrologic cycle, with air and water. You and I don't need to read the newspapers to know that air and water are our two most precious natural resources. While we can do with

out food for weeks we can live no more than 5 minutes without air. Yet as basic as this knowledge is, air and water continue to make newspaper headlines and the reason is obvious. We are experiencing a great dislocation. When weather is behaving it gets no more than a small box of type on the front page and 60 seconds on television. When weather starts making banner headlines we can be sure the clouds are deep or dark. The stories under headlines about air and water are important reading. So are the comprehensive accounts of floods and drought which appear in news and science magazines. So also are such documents as the excellent report, "Restoring the Quality of the Environment," released by the White House in November. It is only through the communication media that we are made fully aware of the dangerous position to which we have come through maltreatment of these precious life-sustaining necessities.

It does not require critical analysis-only plain, garden-variety horsesenseto tell the thinking American that the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Potomac, the Ohio, and the Willamette must again run free and clear; that the Great Lakes, Long Island Sound, Raritan, and San Francisco Bays were not intended as garbage disposals; that the presence of a great American city should not be announced to airline passengers by the pall of smut and smog that enshrouds it. The mistakes, carelessness, and neglect of the past century will, of course, not be corrected in a fortnight. The first step is to intimately know the problem and accord it national attention. President Johnson has lucidly described the situation as he has spoken across the Nation. With regard to water, President Johnson told those in attendance at the dedication of Rayburn Dam on May 8, 1965:

"No single resource is more important to us than water. Our management of America's water resources is basic to the many obligations and many opportunities of our growing population."

Since our involvement with air here is mainly as mover and distributor of water vapor. I shall confine my appraisal of it to this role. However, with regard to this necessary and abused resource, I have many other concerns which I shall not bring up tonight.

After proper definition and expression of any problems, there must come action toward a solution. In response to the President's challenge, the 89th Congress has been exceedingly alert. We have the Water Quality Act, requiring the setting up of standards and providing Federal aid for construction of sewage treatment plants, demonstration plants, and research. The Water Resources Planning Act established the Cabinet-level Water Resources Council to plan the most efficient use of our portion of this planet's water. The Federal Water Project Recreation Act puts outdoor recreation, fish, and wildlife on an equal basis with other major purposes in Federal water resources projects. Interior's Bureau of Outdoor Recreation will direct the planning of these projects together with its former task of comprehensive river basin planning.

Other water-related efforts in which the Department of the Interior has been proud to share include the plans for a proposed Wild Rivers System and an exciting new plan encompassing the entire Potomac River Basin. A sadder but related task has been the continuing study of the Northeast drought. Essentially, the Department of the Interior is an action agency. After I have taken a few moments to define certain problems. I will ask you to consider with me the action I believe has now become essential in areas where you and I have mutual interests and responsibility.

Despite all the progress, some of which I have mentioned and much of which I have not, the large question of daily concern remains: How do we assure for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren, adequate and properly distributed supplies of clean, fresh water for all our varied needs? This huge question involves a subsidiary problem upon which I intend to focus tonight: How can we and how should we make the most effective use of our water resources in the sky to help meet our water needs on the ground?

To place this latter question in context, let us look briefly at the larger problem first. Three years ago a National Academy of Sciences report stated that "limited pure-water resources of the arid West are almost at an end," and that Arizona. for example, was drawing "60 percent of its water supply from overpumped wells." Those of you from New York City and other parts of the Northeast know what we went through last summer during the fourth in a series of belowaverage rainfall years. The Water Resources Council, in its 1966 reappraisal of the Northeast drought, told President Johnson that not only is the crisis the most intense in history, but that the drought is creeping steadily southward. The situation is now entering its 5th year. The average monthly precipitation

for more than 50 months now has been 1 full inch below normal in an area from northern Delaware to northern New Jersey, southeastern New York, western Connecticut, and southwestern Massachusetts. We cannot afford the luxury of assuming that things will be better this year.

The marked southward thrust of the drought has now involved all of Maryland, Delaware, and the northern half of Virginia as well as New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, southeastern New York, and southern New England. Almost all stations reported intensification of the situation during December.

The tone of this drought reappraisal is reminiscent of certain science-fiction programs, where visitations from outer space or incomprehensible changes in environment occur so quickly that the voice of the announcer simply cannot instill the message with any sense of reality. Obviously such abrupt changes are fake and corny. One is aware that one is listening to fiction. But this is not a Ray Bradbury short story or a Thornton Wilder play. It is happening here, now in, the United States. The chorus in these areas is strictly a sober "How dry I am," and by the end of this century there will be twice as many Americans to swell the chorus.

But there is another tune, just as geographically out of joint with recent weather history, coming from other parts of the Nation. Our Denver hosts can give us personal commentaries on the floods that recently caused in excess of $200 million in damage in the Denver area alone, and millions more to the rich farmlands along the Platte and Arkansas Rivers. The rains in Arizona last month were unprecedented and would have caused flood damages twice as large as those which did occur had it not been for the irrigation storage reservoirs of the Salt River project. We all remember the Mississippi floods of late spring and the rampaging rivers which turned the Pacific Northwest into a soggy sponge a year ago.

One side of the weather coin is augmentation of moisture to fight scarcity; the other side is controls to combat excess. Put them together and the total problem facing the Nation is one of control and distribution of the water. It is at this point where our two paths converge-weather modification on the one hand and water storage and distribution systems on the other.

The matter of control and distribution of water resources is not new to the Nation and most particularly is this true of the 17 western States.

For the past 63 years, the Bureau of Reclamation—a part of the Department of the Interior-has made irrigation facilities available and provided water service to more than 9 million acres of land suitable for sustained irrigation. The value of crops and forage produced on these lands over the water controlled years now stands at $21.7 billion. This fantastic figure represents the return from irrigation alone, and it is roughly five times the entire Federal cost of plant, property, and equipment, including even those projects now under construction. While irrigation was the initiating factor in reclamation work and remains its biggest single reason for being, other water users are making increasingly insistent demands on the systems. Provision of municipal and industrial water supplies, generation of hydropower, prevention of floods, regulation of river levels, and enhancement of recreation, fish and wildlife habitant all are claiming their share of consideration in our on-the-ground pooling and dispensing of this important resource.

Yet with all our planning and building and looking ahead to try to outguess the future, we find ourselves still at the mercy of the weather. Diminishing water supplies in some places, destructive floods in others, show that all the massive efforts of past and present still do not add up to that magic word "enough."

In New York our pitchers are dry. In Denver, our cup briefly runneth over. If we are to achieve some sort of nationwide distribution which will correct this condition then we must make progress in order of magnitude greater than we are now making. Many ways of hastening this progress are open to us and we cannot afford to neglect any of them. But to my mind the most logical and challenging is the one which most stirs the imagination. This is worthwhile utilization of the water resources of the sky.

I am not a scientist and I will not be so presumptious as to lecture this group on the scientific aspects of the hydrologic cycle. What does appear to me, because of its potential for a mankind, is the idea of enormous rivers of water flowing over us in the atmosphere; of huge pools of moisture poised above our heads; of enormous reservoirs in vaporous state sailing majestically over mountains, or bumping into them and dropping their precious burdens too soon. We toil here, on the thin skin of our planet, “making do” with the fresh water which moves and puddles up here

and there on the surface of the land, and engage in expensive efforts to make this water walk, not run, to the nearest gravitational exit. In some ways this could be called a downhill fight.

We have concentrated our efforts on the thin layer of planetary surface which is sandwiched between the water-saturated rocks that extend for miles beneath our feet and the moisture-laden air which reaches miles above our heads. We strain to store, to channel, to use and reuse the surface water that nature accords us, before it gravitates away and becomes salted in the oceans. It is time we turned our concerted attention to the time-space continuum of the skies. Where do these overhead rivers flow? What are the fluctuations in their water content? Where, when and why do they puddle up into airborne lakes that overflow, usually in moderation but sometimes in excess?

To know, to understand, and control our surface water resources, how much detail must we use in mapping the moisture of the sky? What of the nature and distribution of particulate matter and how about air-land interaction over desert and forest, lake and farm? Perhaps Langmuir was right when he said, “It may be easier to make the weather than to predict its behavior." But as he would be the first to point out, in order to make something the first requirement is to know your ingredients.

Both the American Meteorelogical Society and the U.S. Weather Bureau are of critical importance in this effort. Your presence here tonight testifies to your resolve that your record shall be an ongoing one. As someone once noted, there is no more prickly place to rest than on your laurels.

Along with these tremendous achievements we can count the results of the research and development projects going on in my own Department and elsewhere in Government and the scientific community-projects aimed at understanding the weather.

However, let's look for a moment at the Federal funds spent last year in research alone on the major units of our environment. Seventy-two and a half million dollars went into studies of the oceans, $212 million into the lands, and $1,555 million into the space program. Similar research in the atmospheric sciences, exclusive of the space portions, amounted to $94 million. Of this, only one-twentieth-$4.1 million-went into weather modification research by all Federal agencies.

I make no brief that these sums should be comparable. I do, however, believe it reasonable to conclude that there is a gap to be filled and that it is in the national interest to greatly expand our studies of the atmosphere so that we may learn to harness its water resources.

It is true that a start has been made a good start. Almost 20 years ago, in 1947, the Bureau of Reclamation, became interested in weather modification as a possible means of assisting in the accomplishment of its mission; namely to provide the water to reclaim the arid and semiarid lands of the West.

This effort culminated in fiscal year 1962, when $100,000 was provided to start such a program. Finally, in 1965, the Bureau was funded with $1,100,000 by the Congress for the specific purpose of weather modification research. The Senate Appropriations Committee instructed that this amount was to be divided between research and orographic and convective weather systems. The committee directed that "emphasis is to be placed on actual water production and the exploration and research is to include application of existing weather modification methods."

The principal justification for this major step was the fact that you and your colleagues in associated sciences, with the generous support of the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Weather Bureau, NASA, and other agencies had advanced the science to the point where engineering research and development activities were in order.

The fiscal year 1966 budget of the Bureau of Reclamation, increased by the Congress to $2.98 million, involves research and development contracts to scientists and engineers in universities and consulting firms. Interior's whole weather modification program is headquartered here in Denver.

To touch lightly on the present program, it encompasses practical engineering research on winter storms in the Rockies, cap clouds in Wyoming, summer cumulus cloud studies in the Dakotas and in Arizona, and potential transmountain diversions in the Pacific Northwest. Other activities include work in the Great Basin and on the Wasatch front near Salt Lake City and Ogden. Right here in Colorado a major physical experiment in the Park Range near Steamboat Springs is underway.

I am proud of this entire program. If it succeeds, and we hope it will. all of us will benefit. The scientists and engineers who are participating are eager,

nthusiastic and talented. Each operation involves the solution of complex ogistic problems, often including pioneering efforts under arduous physical conlitions. The Forest Service, the Weather Bureau, the Geological Survey, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in nearby Boulder, all are taking essential roles as are State institutions and private contractors. This is the kind of cooperation and team effort which will get a big job done on the doublewhich is exactly how we need it.

All these fine activities are encouraging. On cursory inspection they might seem to represent a sufficiently strenuous effort. However, I cannot agree. Nor, I am sure, will most of you. The present reclamation atmospheric water resources program and all other such programs can operate only in terms of 'the present state of the art." As Secretary of the Department of the Interior and as Chairman of the President's Water Resources Council, I salute the workers who have brought us this far along the road. But I think that as scientists you must agree with me that the progress so far represents only a drop in the bucket and that this drop may disappear by evapotranspiration (to borrow one of your terms) if the spigot is not opened much further.

Perhaps the most encouraging signal to go ahead with this program came last week in Washington, D.C., from two of the most highly respected scientific organizations in the country *** the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. Weather modification reports, released independently by an NSF Commission and an NAS Panel give strong endorsement to expanding programs in weather modification. The National Academy pointed out that "to be successful, the national program recommended by the Panel must represent a fine balance between unwarranted optimism and undue skepticism. There is an unparalleled opportunity for our scientific community and our Federal Goverment to demonstrate imagination, perception, and wisdom in the management of a program having both intrinsic scientific interest and potentially far-ranging socioeconomic and political consequences."

The Special Commission for the Science Foundation likewise indicated that activities in this field should progress at a rapidly expanding rate. The Commission recommended that by 1970 annual Federal Funds for all weather modification activities should be in the order of $50 million a year. The report urges that Federal agencies undertake those operational activities required for effective discharge of their particular missions-suppression of lightning by the Forest Service, fog dispersion by the Federal Aviation Agency, and rainfall augmentation in reservoir systems areas by the Department of the Interior. Such agencies, the report went on, should be free to continue and support such research and development as may be required to discharge these missions.

If we are to make a success of precipitation control, as I believe we must, we have no alternative but to be knowledgeable of the water budget of the atmosphere, day in and day out, over any part of the United States, over the Nation as a whole, over this entire continent and the oceans which bound it. In planning development of the water resources of the Colorado River Basin, we are taking into account all the water components of that sorely beset region-its reservoirs, irrigation needs, ground water levels, desalting plants, recreation uses, effect on fish and wildlife, reclamation of sewage effluent, urban demands, industrial recycling, economics, and legal questions, to name a few. How long can we continue to neglect the water flowing overhead? The increasing number of scientists and engineers conducting weather modification experiments in the region tells us the time is not long. I hope you agree.

We have spent decades building a gigantic plumbing system for the water we can catch here on the ground. We have built canals, aqueducts, transmountain diversion tunnels, dams and reservoirs. We have turned rivers upside down and made them flow backward to suit our purposes. All this, I might add, has been at some expense to the management. Is it not time, then, that we began to plan also for aerial distribution via the rivers in the sky as part of this total system? Such gigantic international water distribution systems as that proposed under the title "NAWAPA"-North American Water and Power Alliancemay one day come to pass. But one must ask: What would be the feasibility and expense of providing for some or all of this redistribution by using waterways in the air in addition to or rather than pipes on the ground?

We know enough about man's ability in problem solving to ask not "Can we do it?" but rather, "How soon can we do it?"

This challenge I throw directly to you. You are atmospheric scientists and engineers. It is your responsibility, indeed it is your obligation, to provide the necessary information. We in Washington are part of your Government; we