I’m so glad you reached out to meteorologists instead of relying on social and other media sources on this topic!
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Meteorologists are continually battling the misinformation not only about weather modification (including alleged chemtrails – what a meteorologist knows as contrails – the condensation of moisture on the small particulates emitted by planes), but also climate change. As you noted, the number of conspiracy theories around everything – especially weather and climate – have exploded, especially as these more extreme events happen, likely due to human-generated activities boosting or overwhelming natural cycles.
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Sorry, no weather modification machines and none in the works from what I can tell – it’s purely in the science fiction world at this time. Meteorologists would LOVE to control the weather and be right all the time!
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Unless the military is keeping extreme weather modification technologies secret (unlikely, as improved modification could boost economies and food production or reduce the impact of weather hazards like flooding and strong winds), humanity does not currently have anything beyond cloud seeding and other small-scale projects. Like you mentioned, the effects of cloud seeding are minimal and small-scale – and originally came from military weather studies.
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As a grad student studying microphysics (the science of precipitation mechanisms), I met and talked with Dr. Roscoe Braham – a legendary meteorologist in the world of weather modification who conducted cloud seeding experiments in the 1940s – and he said that it seems unlikely that major changes in the weather would ensue anytime soon from seeding or any disruptive technology that he was aware of. In an interview with the American Meteorological Society, he described the seeding experiments he did with hurricanes in the 40s:
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“Dr. Simpson, and perhaps others, had come up with the thought that if seeding enhanced the vertical motion in conductive clouds, and if you could seed the eye wall clouds of hurricanes, you might enhance the vertical motion, enlarge the eye, spread the energy of the storm out over a larger area, and reduce the intensity of it.
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So he had to have somebody to seed the clouds. The Australians had developed airborne burners, units to burn a silver iodide-acetone mixture from an airplane. And they’d used it successfully in seeding some clouds in Australia. The University of Chicago–in fact, my lab in Chicago had a contract from the Weather Bureau to develop measuring instrumentation and cloud seeding equipment to mount on the Air Force WD50’s to seed hurricanes.
We essentially failed. We… The Australian burners could not cope with the heavy rate it was ingesting water in the hurricanes. And we had great difficulty sustaining a burner operation…
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…This whole business of weather modification involves complex mixtures of the dynamics of the cloud system and the microphysics that goes on. And these things interact.”
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Transcript of Oral History Interview of Roscoe R. Braham. (2002). [Interview by S. Cole]. https://opensky.ucar.edu/islandora/object/archives%3A7584(Original work published 2002) Â
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I love the recent film Twisters, but the premise of bombing a tornado to make it dissipate is pure Hollywood. While technology has advanced greatly since WWII – and humans understand how the atmosphere works better than we did then – we appear to be a long way from disrupting or noticeably enhancing severe thunderstorms and hurricanes.
The heat release of a hurricane is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes.
Could we potentially use 10 nuclear bombs to disrupt a hurricane? Maybe – we aren’t sure if this amount of firepower would even do anything to a system already so packed with energy. Research tests from the 50s-70s seem to indicate that our firepower isn’t enough to battle nature this way.
Are bombs practical or less damage than a hurricane? No – the radiation fallout alone would be deadly, so these tests are forbidden by international treaties.
More on this topic and a brief summary of where the idea was originally considered (along with other crazy bomb use ideas).
