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Coast to coast am w/ George Noory
First Hour: Cloud physicist Ben Livingston will discuss hurricane manipulation technology.
Livingston, 77, moved to Midland with his parents during the Depression. He earned his master's degree in cloud physics from the Naval Weapons Center and Navy Post Graduate School in California, a degree he would use in the battlefields. He seeded clouds and dramatically increased rainfall in his theater of war, creating impassably muddy roads, slowing down the Vietnamese and Korean troops, and saving lives and entire towns from occupation.
Livingston works with scientists and pilots at Weather Modification Inc., in Fargo, N.D. His theories also have been verified by staffers there. He has logged 15,000 hours of hurricane reconnaissance experience and all of his penetrations into the eyes of hurricanes were of the low-level variety -- where he would fly in from low altitude then up and into the eye. He said the refraction of light onto the water through the eye of a hurricane is the most beautiful and memorable site he has ever witnessed. It was made even more so after nightfall when the stars and moon work together.
"In the 1960s, a national priority of our government was hurricane control," Livingston said. "Silver iodide is used as a nuclei that causes raindrops to form. The original hypothesis is that if you get enough rain or cool air into a hurricane you can diminish its velocity and strength. When I left the military in the 1960s, we had the ability to do that, and reduce wind velocity in hurricanes by 25 percent and damage caused by a hurricane by 63 percent."
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