Convergence, Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities of Weather Modification and Regional Climate Intervention Research

Society faces many challenges associated with climate change such as water scarcity, extreme weather, wildfire, etc. Many mitigation strategies have been developed and proposed to address these challenges. One group of strategies involves influencing the weather and climate intentionally. Weather modification and climate intervention concepts are such examples and were developed independently at different times of history to address problems at very different scales. Weather modification generally focuses on impacting specific weather events limited at relatively small spatial-temporal scales. For example, wintertime orographic cloud seeding uses silver iodide particles with the aim of enhancing snowfall for water resource management. Climate intervention was designed to reduce, eliminate or reverse climate change impact by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (CDR for “Carbon Dioxide Removal”) and/or reducing solar energy absorbed by the Earth system (SRM for “Solar Radiation Management”). Stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening are examples of the SRM category.

On one hand, weather modification practices have become more active globally in recent decades, which leads to regional and possible global impacts on weather and climate. On the other hand, the marine cloud brightening concept was adapted to address specific problems such as coral bleaching in confined areas and times. The term “regional climate intervention” is commonly used for climate intervention at the regional scale. The line between weather modification and regional climate intervention has become blurred. Research on these topics starts to converge, not just in terms of relevant scales, but also in terms of key cloud and aerosol processes.

This presentation provides an overview of the converging research landscape of these two topics and summarizes advances and challenges in weather modification and regional climate intervention research. Future directions, suggestions, and opportunities are also covered in this presentation.