There is a chance, for example, that large numbers of the particles of the seeding material are taken up by the water droplets in the clouds and are being deactivated. The action of nuclei is the main purpose of the seeding, so I think observations of this kind are important.

So a combined type of study in which you can see all of these things happening within the clouds, as well as measuring the precipitation in time and amount, is the type of experiment we should be planning here. Locations in the Reno area are being designed for doing this. Senator CANNON. Does that conclude your statement, Mr. Warburton?

Mr. WARBURTON. Yes, I think that concludes my statement. Thank you.

Senator CANNON. Thank you very much for appearing here. We appreciate very much your views, and if you will furnish us that additional information for the record, I think it would be helpful to us. Mr. WARBURTON. Thank you.

Senator CANNON. The next witness, Mr. Charles Thomas, from the Nevada Department of Economic Development.

STATEMENT OF CHARLES R. THOMAS, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, NEVADA DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, my name is "Chuck" Thomas. I am assistant director from the Nevada Department of Economic Development. My testimony is quite brief and of a very general nature.

I am here today on behalf of the Nevada Department of Economic Development, which is vitally interested in the proposed legislation under discussion.

Our department was created by the Nevada Legislature in 1955; and we were assigned the duty of advertising, publicizing, promoting, and aiding in the development of the vital economic interests of the State of Nevada. We are committed to the support of all activities relating to the economic development of the Silver State.

Nevada is experiencing a tremendous rate of growth. For example, our population has increased by 71 percent since 1960. The number of manufacturing firms has increased by 44 percent since 1958. And this year, we expect to host 19.6 million out-of-State visitors, compared with the 12.9 million who came 8 years ago.

The adequate availability of water has been a key reason for Nevada's mammoth growth. However, as we project ahead, we realize that there might not always be ample supplies of this precious liquid.

And so we must plan ahead, we believe, searching for new sources of water for consumption in our urban and rural areas, and for use by industry, agriculture, mining, and recreation.

We believe that Senate bill 23 provides a means for orderly research, leading to the development of more usable water through weather modification and through techniques better utilizing the moisture sent to earth.

The Nevada Department of Economic Development heartily endorses the provisions of S. 23 and hopes that the bill will be most expeditiously implemented.

Thank you.

Senator CANNON. Thank you very much, Mr. Thomas. We appreciate your being here and giving us the views of the department of economic development.

Mr. THOMAS. Thank you, Senator.

Senator CANNON. Commander Jorgenson, do you and Dr. St. Amand want to appear together on this?

Commander JORGENSON. It would be probably shorter and easier if we both appear.

Senator CANNON. Comdr. Paul T. Jorgenson, Geophysics Group, Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, Calif., and Dr. Pierre St. Amand, Geophysics Group, Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, Calif.

STATEMENTS OF COMDR. PAUL T. JORGENSON AND DR. PIERRE ST. AMAND, GEOPHYSICS GROUP, NAVAL ORDNANCE TEST STATION, CHINA LAKE, CALIF.

Senator CANNON. We are very happy to have you here. We are aware of the important work you are doing in this field and will be happy to have your views. You may proceed as you wish. Dr. ST. AMAND. The Naval Ordnance Test Station began work in weather modification in 1961 taking advantage of the fact that we have an almost unique position in the country to do development work in the production of nuclei for cloud seeding. The original work depended on an invention by a pair of chemists who worked there-a Dr. Burkhart and Dr. Finnegan-in which they developed a method for producing a reaction from silver iodide or lead iodide smoke. As time has gone by the program has expanded. The number of things we now produce for weather modification has greatly increased and the scope of our interest has increased.

Primarily the work is aimed at giving the U.S. Navy and the other armed forces, if they should care to use it, the capability of modifying the environment, to their own advantage, or to the disadvantage of an enemy. We regard the weather as a weapon. Anything one can use to get his way is a weapon and the weather is as good a one as any.

This part of our work is coming along very slowly, although we are working as steadily as we can with the manpower and facilities available to us. The byproducts of our work have been made available to other members of the scientific profession. We have furnished our equipment and nucleants that we have made available to other people in the country, and they have used them for experiments.

One cannot be all things to all men and very often it is nice to let somebody else perform the experiment with what you have provided. We have, for example, worked with the U.S. Weather Bureau on this Project Storm Fury. The project was hypothecated on our ability to massively seed clouds rapidly reaching a capability which did not exist before we began making them pyrotechnically. We have worked with the Bureau of Reclamation

Senator CANNON. Excuse me. Now is this project related toward

hurricane activities?

Dr. ST. AMAND. Yes, sir. It is intended for the control and amelioration of hurricanes. We have worked with the Bureau of Reclama

tion on their project in the southern Sierra Nevada, we have collaborated with the Colorado State College and with South Dakota in their hail-suppression program, and the coming summer we will be working with them on their hail-suppression project.

We have collaborated with the State of Washington in an effort by that State to increase the rainfall in the mountains and to determine the effectiveness of seeding in their climatic regime there.

We have pioneered in the use of pryotechniques in this field because it gives a capability of putting nucleants in a precise spot in a cloud in any desired quantity within a period of time short with respect to the lifetime of the cloud.

Senator CANNON. Would you describe how you do this?

Dr. ST. AMAND. There are a number of different ways we do this. We have prepared a number of devices which caught fire and burned and the smoke from these devices is the nucleating agent you want. These nucleating agents include silver iodide, which is a comparatively short-lived agent that converts water vapor into ice in the cloud. We have lead iodide which is a long-lived agent which is not destroyed by sunlight. We have various hygroscopic materials which remove water vapor from the air in liquid form droplets.

These devices can be carried on board an airplane or balloon or any other similar artifact and flown into clouds in the position best calculated to yield the effect the person wants in the course of an experiment.

Materials can be dropped from an airplane and burned while they are in the air, or they can be burned on the ground.

One of the handier items that we manufacture for a limited use is a signal flare pistol, something that can be held out of the window of an airplane and shot. This can be used for cloud seeding and has been very effective.

The overall effectiveness of the nucleants that we produce is being tested all the time both in the laboratory and in the field. Some of the field testing we do ourselves; a lot of it we do in collaboration with others, as I have already stated.

Do you have anything to add to this, Commander?

Commander JORGENSON. No. You have covered the main points. Our interest, of course, is military, but we have and intend to continue to collaborate with other people.

Senator CANNON. With your interest being military I presume that you have not necessarily engaged in ground measuring activities and that sort of thing; or have you?

Commander JORGENSON. No, sir.

Dr. ST. AMAND. No, sir. We have neither the time nor the personnel nor the money for this, and in connection with our work with the Bureau of Reclamation, this work has been done or is being done by other people that they employ for that purpose.

Senator CANNON. You said that you were working in connection with the Department of Commerce and the Weather Bureau. Does your funding come from the Navy Department or do you secure funding assistance from some of the other agencies?

Dr. ST. AMAND. Our money has come entirely from the Navy Department.

Senator CANNON. Do you have a cooperative activity in the Storm Fury project with the Department of Commerce and the Weather Bureau?

Dr. ST. AMAND. That is correct. Each funds his own activities. Senator CANNON. Have you actually participated in this project? Are you doing just an R. & D. effort now or have you actually carried out some practical tests in this field?

Dr. ST. AMAND. We have seeded hurricanes in 1961 and in 1963. We seeded hurricanes twice and we seeded cumulus clouds twice.

Senator CANNON. What are your observations on the results of those four activities?

Dr. ST. AMAND. The observations, expressed very briefly, are that when clouds are massively seeded, the effects are immediately noticeable to a casual observer, but that at the present time a sufficiently concerted effort has not been made on a hurricane to be able to produce anything very definite. I suspect that too little is known of the mechanism of the hurricane to really be able to do something at the present time. With continued experimentation, more would be learned of the effects, and I suspect that in a number of years it might be possible to alter the storms to our advantage.

Senator CANNON. Are you working on some programs along that line? Are you working on operational experiments or are you still engaged in basic R. & D.?

Dr. ST. AMAND. The basic research and development in nuclei for freezing clouds is about through. We are busy improving things now but that is about finished as far as we are concerned. We now are interested in developing field experiments for the specific use of the military and among these I should mention are experiments with dispersible fog. Fog of the sort that Professor Mordy was showing here can be easily dispersed by the use of dry ice or silver iodide, because it is cold and can be made to freeze. Warm fogs are an extremely difficult problem, but they are an extremely important problem, and the Navy in almost every climate in the world has to contend with these, especially in getting aircraft safely off and on aircraft carriers and also to cover targets.

Senator CANNON. What is your approach with respect to warm fog? Dr. ST. AMAND. We have attempted to change the fog by introducing into the fog droplets of material that take the water vapor from the air. A cloud such as a fog is stable because the droplets are all of the same size. A collision between droplets of the same size is difficult to obtain, because they do not develop a velocity relative to each other, and even if they do, aerodynamic forces prevent collision between the droplets and subsequent coalescence in droplet growth.

What we attempted to do was to obtain hygroscopic droplets which, introduced into the fog, would dry the water vapor from the space between the droplets, causing the fog droplets themselves to subsequently evaporate and contribute their water vapor to the droplets of the seeding material, and their size is much greater than the other droplets, and they fall, sweeping the fog droplets from the air.

Senator CANNON. Do you feel that the status of weather modification research is such at the present time that we are ready for a large scale experiment?

Dr. ST. AMAND. I feel that at the present time unless we go into a large scale experiment we will not learn enough, soon enough, about the problem. We are now at the point in the art where large scale experiments are needed to be able to determine how effective they are going to be.

Senator CANNON. Do you feel that weather modification activities should be centralized in one bureau?

Dr. ST. AMAND. We do not. I think that diversity here is extremely important. There are various aspects to the work.

Now the National Science Foundation supports primarily a high quality of theoretical research and high quality laboratory research of an academic sort necessary to answer the fundamental questions. The Bureau of Reclamation supports engineering research intended strictly for the production of water. This is different than the National Science Foundation, which is interested in the physics of the cloud and perhaps in things other than the making of rain.

The centralization of authority in a subject in science, before the subject is well understood, usually results in the stultification of the material because I don't think any one person has enough vision to appreciate the possibilities of everybody else's approach to the

matter.

At present I would like very much to see a flexibility in this and a diversity of effort.

Senator CANNON. I was going to ask you if you felt that a substantial increase in Federal expenditures is warranted at the present time, but I presume that the answer is self-evident in view of the fact that you thought we were ready for large-scale experiments. That would of course be the inhibiting factor, would it not, on largescale experiments?

Dr. ST. AMAND. Yes, sir.

Senator CANNON. What is the monetary extent of the effort that the Navy is putting into this now?

Commander JORGENSON. As far as our own organization is concerned, last year it was $250,000 and this year it is $200,000.

Senator CANNON. So actually your effort is reduced this year over what it has been?

Dr. ST. AMAND. This is due to circumstances beyond our control, shall we say.

Senator ČANNON. I can well imagine that. In any event you have had quite a substantial reduction in your program, not only because of the rising costs but because of a smaller amount of funds?

Commander JORGENSON. It does hurt. It hurts particularly because we think that we have made progress in the last year, and if we are able to move somewhat faster and perhaps into other areas-much of the previous research was engaged particularly on the silver iodide, cold clouds. Now we are attempting to shift over to an area of prime interest to the Navy into the warm cloud area and still finish up some of the cold cloud silver iodide research.

Dr. ST. AMAND. $200,000 is about 10 man-years if one does not have to buy equipment and supplies. Actually we are managing to get about, I would say, 6 man-years out of that money. The rest of it is going in to support Project Storm Fury and other expenses that are more or less beyond our control.

We could, I think, very efficiently handle another $100,000 or perhaps $200,000 a year without beginning to build an empire.

Senator CANNON. What was your effort prior to the last year which you said was $250,000?

Commander JORGENSON. This was primarily the support of Project Storm Fury Center and it varied with the activity of the project.