To provide a central focus for the overall weather modification research and development effort.

To overcome fragmentation and duplication in past weather modification research activities.

To develop a national program with goals, objectives, priorities, and milestones.

To develop a plan to allocate resources to the national program elements. To effectively coordinate activities of Federal departments and agencies providing support to or conducting weather modification research.

To provide the scientific and management competence, the dedication, and the resources necessary to make the national goals in weather modification an integral part of its basic mission.

For the above reasons and because of our conviction that technologies for different modes of weather modification that one would wish to develop for different application all flow from a common font of science and experimentation, we subscribe to the view that the science could best be served by assignment of lead responsibility to an appropriate agency.

We feel that the charter for this lead responsibility should include the following:

The lead agency would assume the leadership for planning the federal weather modification program, in concert with those other concerned agencies, universities, and the private sector.

The lead agency would present, within the Executive Branch, a consolidated national weather modification research plan and be available to represent the national plan before the Congress.

The lead agency would, within the framework of the joint planning effort, encourage and assist in justifying programmatic activities in other agencies that might contribute significantly to the national weather modification objectives, especially when those programs can be implemented as supplements to the agencies' on-going mission-related activities.

The lead agency would take on the responsibility for presenting the budgetary requirements to carry out the national plan to the Office of Management and Budget and, with due consideration of overall priorities of the agency, would seek to provide within its own budget for activities essential to the national plan and not incorporated in the budgets of the other agencies.

It is expected that other departments and agencies, because of their continuing responsibility for the application of weather modification, would provide for the necessary financial support within their individual agency budgets.

The recommendation that NOAA be designated the lead agency for weather modification research stems from its broad weather responsibilities as the principal national civil weather agency. These broad weather responsibilities give NOAA a broad range of managerial, technical, and facility capabilities suited to the role of a lead agency. It should be emphasized that, within the framework of the designation of NOAA as lead agency, it is expected that the National Science Foundation would continue to have the primary responsibility for supporting the basic science and the fundamental research at the universities and at the National Center for Atmosphreic Research. Other Departments, such as Interior and Agriculture, would continue to exercise responsibilities for application of weather modification in support of their missions. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration would continue to have primary responsibility for supporting research and development in the application of space technology to problems in weather modification. The Department of State would exercise the responsibility for assessing the impacts of weather modification activities on U.S. international relations and formulate foreign policy positions relevant to such activities.

Mr. BROWN. Our next witness this morning has also been rescheduled from yesterday, Dr. Alfred J. Eggers, Assistant Director for Research Applications, National Science Foundation.

Of course, it is worthy to note that not only has NSF provided the Chairman of ICAS, but it also has the largest single weather modification program.

We are happy to have you here, Dr. Eggers, and you may, of course, proceed with your statement in whatever way it suits your convenience.

Without objection, the full text will be included in the record, and if you are anxious to catch a plane or something, you may summarize it, and proceed in whatever way you like.

STATEMENT OF DR. ALFRED J. EGGERS, JR., ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR RESEARCH APPLICATIONS, NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Dr. EGGERS. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, it is a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to testify before you today on the National Science Foundation's weather modification research activities, what has been learned from them, and how this information bears on consideration of H.R. 10039 and S. 3383.

The weather modification program of the National Science Foundation is rooted in Public Law 85-510, which, as was noted earlier, was passed in 1958 and which gave the National Science Foundation initial go-ahead to establish the Nation's first major weather modification research activity. The program was initiated in 1958 as a program in basic and applied research and evaluation and was transferred to the RANN (Research Applied to National Needs) program of the Foundation in 1971. NSF also supports basic research on cloud physics and other aspects of atmospheric sciences and this research has very importantly strengthened our weather modification efforts.

The NSF/RANN weather modification program is currently the largest weather modification research program in the Federal Government. Funding levels over the past 5 years, 1972 to 1976, for the three agencies with the largest overall Federal programs, namely Commerce, Interior and NSF, are shown in the attachment. You will note that they sum up something like $70 million in fiscal year 1976.

I believe that the Foundation's program is a balanced one in that it deals with both intentional weather modification and unintentional, or inadvertent, modification of weather caused by large cities, large energy facilities, industrial and transportation activities. It is balanced also in that it fully recognizes the importance of both the development of technological tools and the societal implications of applied technology. Consequently, we support research in the physical sciences as well as the legal, economic, and social sciences. I would like to describe a few selected aspects of our program.

The largest weather modification study we are funding is the national hail research experiment, or NHRE, as it is referred to. The overall goal of the experiment is to determine whether hail suppression is feasible and cost-effective, and whether it can be accomplished without detrimentally affecting overall precipitation. This project is managed and coordinated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with some 13 subcontracts to universities and 3 to small businesses, plus involvement by NOAA and other Government agencies. As you know, Mr. Chairman, the hail damage to crops in the United States was estimated to be some $680 million in 1973, with some $130 million in other property damage. That would include everything from broken windows to damage to automobiles and to small livestock. Total damage to the individual crops and the States with the maximum amount of damage are listed on the next page. You will note in the case of wheat we have the highest loss estimated in 1973 as some

$172 million. The greatest losses occurred in Kansas and were something over $36 million for that year.

The next highest was corn, at $123.5 million total, with Iowa sustaining the highest total loss of more than $31 million. The lowest loss was in tobacco, $65.1 million, and the major component of that occurred in North Carolina at a little over $24 million. A very substantial loss in the area of fruits and vegetables occurred in Čalifornia with a component value of $8.5 million. The total loss in that category in the United States was a little more than $76 million.

There is a high level of interest in developing hail suppression techniques to the point where they can be effectively utilized to reduce hail damage dollar levels.

The most knowledgeable scientists in the Nation provided guidance on the appropriate experimental design in the initial stages of the NHRE experiment. Early enthusiasm for the experiment on the part of ICAS, the Interdepartmental Committee on Atmospheric Sciences, which Mr. Todd represented here just a moment ago, and the scientific community stemmed largely from the reported successes in hail suppression in the Soviet Union. The Russian concept was widely believed to be the appropriate concept for guiding our experiment and was used as the model for the experimental design.

However, after 3 years of experimentation in the field, NHRE found that the Soviet model of hail formation does not apply in northeast Colorado, where our experiment is being conducted. Based on NHRE experience, new theories have been postulated on how hail develops and grows in the two different types of hail storms encountered the so-called supercelled storm and the multicelled storm. Supercelled clouds are generally the ones that result in the most damaging hail.

It is now hypothesized that, rather than seeding in the core of the maximum updraft as was done previously, seeding is best carried out in the weak updraft regions of the newly-formed developing storms. During the period of the study, the researchers have recognized increasingly that hail storms in general, and the nucleation and growth of hail embryos to the size of damaging hail stones in particular, are extremely complicated. How, when, and where this process occurs and how best to interfere with the natural hail development process needs further study. The answers to these questions may appreciably increase the effectiveness of hail suppression.

In this summer's research program, experiments will be conducted to gather further data on hail storms and increase the fundamental knowledge about such storms, especially as it relates to those areas where the nucleation process can best be interfered with. This improved knowledge and expanded data base will help to provide a basis for redesign of the hail suppression experiment by improving the seeding concept and techniques, and by increasing the power of statistical evaluation procedures.

At the same time that a hail suppression experiment is being conducted, the precipitation augmentation potential of the seeding technique developed will be determined. Actually, an effective hail suppression technique that will cause additional rainfall when needed would be desirable.

RANN is also sponsoring a technology assessment of hail suppression. The economic, legal, sociological, and environmental impacts of

hail suppression will be examined in detail to provide an assessment of the overall impact of hail suppression on society. That study is under the leadership of Stanley Changnon of the Illinois State Water Survey.

The research experience in severe storms gained from NHRE and METROMEX, which I will describe later, is being drawn upon to investigate wind shear, another part of the Weather Hazard Mitigation effort. Recent airline accidents have pointed to local wind shear phenomena as major hazards to aviation. In many cases strong wind shear occurrences have been associated with frontal zones, or the gust fronts of severe thunderstorms. The crash of an airliner 1 year ago at J. F. Kennedy International Airport is a case in point. As an unintended benefit of these research programs, we are now expecting to develop both airborne and ground based warning systems for detecting and warning about the presence of local wind shear so that pilots may avoid such hazardous conditions. This research is done, of course, in cooperation with the Department of Transportation.

Improving the technology for conducting and evaluating weather modification experiments is another goal of the NSF program. The large natural variability of atmospheric processes is a major obstacle to successful field tests of weather modification technology. This large natural variability requires long, costly experiments to prove the results of weather modification experiments. One of the priority research areas in weather modification involves the combined use of predictive models, advanced measurement systems, and statistical analysis to improve experimental design and evaluation so there will be an overall reduction in time required for conducting definitive experiments. That lesson, by the way, Mr. Chairman, came out particularly strongly from our work in the NHRE experiment.

An unfortunate situation exists in weather modification in that most of the data resulting from seeding are from operational programs which are nonrandomized. This means that definitive statements concerning the degree of effectiveness cannot be made using statistical techniques presently available. This offers a continuing challenge to develop more sophisticated methods for evaluating the results from nonrandomized seeding projects.

Let me turn now to our inadvertent weather modification research activities. Man has long recognized that cities affect their local weather and climate. For many centuries, a serious concern has also been that large-scale changes in agricultural practices, such as deforestation and irrigation, may influence weather and climate on both local and regional scales. However, a concerted research effort has only recently been initiated in these areas.

An extensive research program in inadvertent weather modification was initiated by NSF in 1970. The primary effort was a field project called the Metropolitan Meterological Experiment, or METROMEX. Its objective is to establish the ways in which an urban-industrial area affects precipitation and weather. Complementary research is being carried out in this project by several other Federal and State agencies including ERDA and others.

METROMEX will be completed in 1977. Among the significant results to date are the following:

There is a summer precipitation increase of 10 to 30 percent downwind of St. Louis which varies from year to year in location and intensity.

The major precipitation anomaly is associated with moderate to heavy rainfall situations resulting in as much as an 80-percent increase in hailstorms and hail intensities in the anomaly area.

Temperature excesses and moisture deficits occur in the urban mixing layer, affecting large thunderstorms. These anomalies are primarily the result of altered land use, the so-called heat island effect. Particulates from urban-industrial sources affect cloud structure and the increased production of giant condensation nuclei influences the warm, non freezing rain process. However, the anomalies in nucleating particles have not been directly linked with the observed precipitation anomaly.

Inadvertent effects have produced conflicting socioeconomic impacts such as increased ground water pollution, crop yield increases from increased precipitation and increased crop hail damage, so there are balancing effects.

The results of METROMEX provide important implications for planned weather modification. Specifically these results provide: The first concrete evidence for precipitation modification in the corn belt area of the Midwest.

The most convincing demonstration of precipitation modification from summertime convective systems.

Hail and rainfall trends are the same, that is, more rain, more hail. Enhancement appears to be greater in dry periods.

METROMEX provides a basis for future studies in the area of inadvertent weather modification. Immediate research needs include a better understanding of the underlying physical processes, a test of transferability of findings, an extensive evaluation of socioeconomic impacts, and developing procedures for regulation and mitigation of adverse impacts. Emerging evidence of the important role of thermodynamic processes supports the need for exploring the impacts of both highly concentrated sources such as industrial parks as well as largescale land use changes for agriculture and urbanizing areas.

As a part of the METROMEX studies, rainfall sampled downwind of St. Louis has been found to be more acidic than that in surrounding areas. More extensive data on acid rainfall has been collected in the northeastern United States. All of this points to an emerging concern for the inadvertent ecological impact of urbanindustrial atmospheric discharges as they affect agriculture, inland aquatic systems, forestry, and building materials. Some observers have attributed a reduction in forest growth in Scandinavia and New England to acid rainfall. I might add there, Mr. Chairman, that this has also been noticed in our own Midwest, especially in the Lead Belt area of Missouri. The acid rainfall byproduct of lead smelting was studied under our program.

Mr. BROWN. If I may interrupt you, Dr. Eggers.

Dr. EGGERS. Yes, sir.

Mr. BROWN. It seems that you have sort of merged into a discussion of effects, you have combined pollution effects with weather effects and obviously they overlap. Are you indicating that you do not have a