in control tolerance lost, as well as the increased effects of depolarization, appear to offset (at least in part) the advantages realized in going to the higher beam frequency. If the motion of small scale atmospheric disturbance is initially unstable, or might be thought to become unstable at some later stage, it may nevertheless be completely altered by even a small change in its initial thermal stage by the heat transferred to it from an SPS beam. A great number of disturbances are always present in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, they are so small in intensity or extent that they completely escape detection within the present weather observation network. When perturbed by SPS heating, however, these disturbances may thereafter exert trigger actions and release large-scale, inportant new developments. To achieve intended types of weather modification without miscalculation, it would be necessary in principle to determine where, when, and generally also in what way such developments would originate. Therefore, to apply weather modification methods successfully, one must know beforehand the situations in which such trigger actions are present. (In Storm, author George Stewart sized it up in a dramatic way, by suggesting that a sneeze in Szechwan made Alaska snowbound: cyclogenesis from the sneeze in China led irreversibly to an extratropical cyclone named Maria which moved across the North Pacific and Alaska to California.) If the power density of the SPS beam were increased from 25 up to 100 mW/cm , a 22.2-GHz beam could add a sizeable amount of radiant heat directly to the atmosphere traversed, as well as indirectly to the air just above ground heated by the SPS beam. From recent simulations of a tropical atmosphere, a team comprised of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the Center for Environment and Man (CEM), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that, for a vertically incident 100-mW/cm2 beam, heating rates of approximately 7 C° per day would occur through clouds and a subcloud layer up to 10 m above the surface. The SPS power penetrating to the ground or ocean would be double the radiative flux from the atmosphere and five times that from the Sun. In a wintertime, continental atmosphere, CEM found that a vertically incident 100-mW/cm beam heating the ground for one hour would thus contribute indirectly to a 5 to 10 C° temperature rise in a 5-m-thick layer of air above the ground. This layer, moreover, would be effective as a storage medium for the SPS radiant heat source for up to half a day after the SPS had been turned off, even after only one
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