Military wants the weather on its side

By Leonard David

Senior space writer

updated 6:47 p.m. ET Oct. 31, 2005

The one-two hurricane punch from Katrina and Wilma, along with predictions of more severe weather in the future, has scientists pondering ways to save lives, protect property and possibly even control the weather.

While efforts to tame storms have so far been clouded by failure, some researchers aren’t willing to give up the fight. And even if changing the weather proves overly challenging, residents and disaster officials can do a better job of planning and reacting.

In fact, military officials and weather modification experts could be on the verge of joining forces to better gauge, react to and possibly nullify future hostile forces churned out by Mother Nature.

While some consider the idea farfetched, some military tacticians have already pondered ways to turn weather into a weapon.

Harbinger of things to come?
The U.S. military reaction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that slammed the U.S. Gulf Coast might be viewed as a harbinger of things to come. While in this case it was joint air and space operations to deal with after-the-fact problems, perhaps the foundation for how to fend off disastrous weather may also be forming.

Numbers of spaceborne assets were tapped, including:

• Navigation and timing signals from the Global Positioning System of satellites.
• The Global Broadcast Service, a one-way, space-based, high-capacity broadcast communication system.
• The Army’s Spectral Operations Resource Center to exploit commercial remote-sensing satellite imagery and prepare high-resolution images to civilian and military responders to permit a better understanding of the devastated terrain.
• U.S. Air Force Space Command’s Space and Missile Systems Center Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites that compared "lights at night" images before and after the disaster to provide data on human activity.

Is it far-fetched to see in this response the embryonic stages of an integrated military/civilian weather reaction and control system?

Mandate to continually improve
The use of space-based equipment to assist in cleanup operations — with a look toward future prospects — was recently noted by Gen. Lance Lord, commander of the Air Force Space Command, during an Oct. 20 Pacific Space Leadership Forum in Hawaii.

U.S. Air Force Satellite pictures of the Gulf Coast, provided by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's spacecraft, show the "lights at night" view before and after Hurricane Katrina.

"We saw firsthand the common need for space after the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean," Lord said. "Natural disasters don’t respect international boundaries. Space capabilities were leveraged immediately after the tsunami to help in the search and rescue effort … but what about before the disaster?"

Lord said that an even better situation would have involved predicting the coming disaster and warning those in harm’s way. "No matter what your flag or where you wave it from ... the possibility of saving hundreds of thousands of people is a mandate to continually improve," he advised.

The U.S. Air Force is also looking at ways to make satellites and satellite launches cheaper and also reduce the amount of time it takes to launch into space from months to weeks to days and hours, Lord said. Having that capability will increase responsiveness to international needs, he said, such as the ability to send up a satellite to help collect information and enhance communications when dealing with international disasters.

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