NOAA is falling short in its oversight of the reporting on weather modification projects that range from conventional cloud seeding to cutting-edge solar geoengineering, a government watchdog agency reported Monday.
While climate change is spurring more interest in atmospheric tinkering, the Government Accountability Office cautioned in its new assessment that NOAA needs to improve its handling of the reports required for weather modification endeavors.
“The agency is not fully meeting its responsibilities to maintain and share weather modification reports,” GAO reported, adding that “weather modification operators may report inconsistent information or fail to report, and we estimate that over half of all the reports filed with NOAA likely have errors, including missing required information.”
State and local agencies across nine states were spending or planning to spend a combined total of at least $20 million on cloud seeding to increase local precipitation in the form of rain or snow, according to GAO, and the reviewers noted that “as global temperature has increased, so has interest in solar geoengineering.”
