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Hail Suppression: Progress in Assessing its Costs and Benefits

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Hail: A Review of Hail Science and Hail Suppression

Part of the book series: Meteorological Monographs ((METEOR,volume 16))

Abstract

This paper reviews the contributions of the social and biological sciences to our understanding of the wide range of benefits and costs which may be anticipated from the development of reliable and effective techniques of operational hail suppression. The first two sections introduce the subject and outline the limited amount of progress made prior to 1970. Sections 3 and 4 describe investigations into the direct benefits and the actual and anticipated/operational costs of hail suppression programs. Research into secondary economic effects and ecological impacts is reviewed in Section 5, which also notes the present unsatisfactory state of our knowledge about down-wind influences. Efforts to understand the complex and dynamic reactions of people affected by programs of weather modification are dealt with in Section 7, while Section 8 outlines the work of legal scholars in planning a framework of laws and institutions capable of coping with the social conflicts which will accompany widespread application of suppression techniques. The two concluding sections highlight some significant research on impact assessment presently underway, and identify some issues which have thus far received insufficient attention. Comprehensive, quantitatively oriented cost-benefit analysis and operational hail suppression are both relatively new techniques about which considerable controversy continues. They have not yet been combined in a satisfactory manner but the effort to do so has produced much useful information and should be continued.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Part of the work reported herein was performed as a part of, and with some support from, the National Hail Research Experiment, managed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and sponsored by the Weather Modification Program, Research Applications Directorate, National Science Foundation.

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  1. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA

    Stewart W. Borland

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  1. Stewart W. Borland
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G. Brant Foote Charles A. Knight

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© 1977 American Meteorological Society

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Borland, S.W. (1977). Hail Suppression: Progress in Assessing its Costs and Benefits. In: Foote, G.B., Knight, C.A. (eds) Hail: A Review of Hail Science and Hail Suppression. Meteorological Monographs, vol 16. American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-935704-30-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-935704-30-0_8

  • Publisher Name: American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-935704-30-0

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