Earth weather and climate control: can space technology contribute?

With ongoing progress in space technology, questions of its potential for the modification of weather and climate phenomena (often summarized by the term 'geoengineering') ranging from small-scale severe weather events to mitigation of effects caused by global climate change and ozone depletion have become popular. This paper reviews the current state of scientifically based studies in this context and attempts to provide a basis for an assessment of geoengineering efforts with respect to technological, economic and fundamental scientific aspects. The overview indicates that the current state of knowledge about climate variability as a consequence of natural and anthropogenic influences is sufficient to classify geoengineering solutions as highly risky and their consequences as extremely difficult to predict. Even on smaller scales and with less complexity of interacting processes, only very limited boundary conditions, i.e. a narrow range of atmospheric variability and land surface topography favouring the intended alteration, seem to justify weather modification. Moreover, as for systems reaching scales of large organized storms and hurricanes, required energy and control resources are well beyond existing capabilities. Consequently, the use of space technology for provision of better information on environmental change and integration of remote sensing data into weather and climate models forecasts is supported, (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd, All rights reserved.