43 11 30, 7,000 feet, looking southeast from seeded area

Tahoe timber.

4.8.-15:45; 7,000 feet, looking down at Sparks Sanatarium through hole cleared by seeding.

Senator CANNON. You have indicated here 4-1-I am saying this for the purpose of the record-4-1; this is the airport area before any cloud seeding had taken place above the Reno airport area.

Professor MORDY. Yes.

Senator CANNON. And 4-2, is that before the seeding or immediately after?

Professor MORDY. That is 48 minutes later, showing the hole that opened up as a result of the seeding.

Senator CANNON. Forty-eight minutes after the preceding picture or after seeding?

Professor MORDY. After the preceding picture.

Senator CANNON. And 4-3 represents what?

Professor MORDY. That would be an hour and a half in this instance after the seeding, showing the hole in the clouds.

Senator CANNON. And 4-4?

Professor MORDY. Again an hour and a half, from a different direction, with the hole closing in now.

Senator CANNON. And how about 4-5?

Professor MORDY. This is a different experiment in the afternoon. Senator CANNON. A different experiment on the same day? Professor MORDY. Yes. January 15, in the afternoon.

Senator CANNON. So that both sets-4-1, 4-2, and 4-3 and 4-4 were experiments over the Reno airport and 4-5, 4-6, 4-7, and 4-8 were a different experiment over the Reno airport on the same date? Professor MORDY. Yes.

Now if you could indulge me just a little further, I would like to show you some photographs taken by the television station KOLO, of the snow that fell beneath these experiments.

Senator CANNON. Will you narrate that as we go along so that the reporter will have this as a matter of record.

Professor MORDY. The purpose of showing this film is to show you the intensity and size of the snowflakes which fell at the Reno airport following seeding and these are shots taken by the television cameraman at the time the snow was beginning.

Now you see the size of the snowflakes which occurred from this relatively shallow layer of clouds. The snowflakes were quite varied in size but the largest of them were a quarter of an inch in diameter, bundles of crystals of snow, and as you can see, there is enough snow here in this photograph to cover the ground and as I say, we had only the measurement at the U.S. Weather Bureau station. The greater part of the snow fell from there eastward.

We have a measurement by the Weather Bureau which indicated a trace of snow. We have downwind from this point a whitening of the ground with a maximum somewhere east of the Reno airport. Senator CANNON. Did any snow occur surrounding the area that you seeded?

Professor MORDY. NO.

Senator CANNON. Only the seeded area?

Professor MORDY. Only the seeded area had snow.

Senator CANNON. What was the amount of the seeding material that you used in each instance?

Professor MORDY. It was roughly 50 pounds of granulated dry ice for each pass of the aircraft.

Senator CANNON. How many passes of the aircraft did you make? Professor MORDY. In some of these photographs you will see three distinct passes. Here, in this photograph you see three distinct passes of the aircraft.

Senator CANNON. Your testimony is that you believe that this could have been increased to 0.7 of an inch over a 7-day period or 0.1 of an inch a day, approximately?

Professor MORDY. I said I thought that was a conservative estimate of what might have been done.

Senator CANNON. Had that been done, that would have been almost 10 percent of the total average annual precipitation at that location?

Professor MORDY. That is what I was implying; yes, sir.

Senator CANNON. You may proceed.

Professor MORDY. Why then is there so much argument about weather modification? It is because nature does not always provide so nearly perfect conditions for an experiment. Storms are complicated and many variables function to make it difficult to sort out what is happening naturally from what is being influenced by the experimenter. And sorting out these influences has been all the harder because of the meager tools available to the scientist.

Most of us have traveled on the sea at times and are impressed with its immensity. Well, the atmosphere is not only every bit as big but in fact much bigger, which is to infer the difficulty in getting enough measurements to make reasonable descriptions of the cloud systems we are attempting to influence.

As a result, most large-scale cloud-seeding experiments have been verified by looking at variations from normal precipitation over as