How does NOAA’s WMRA reporting interact with state permitting and is there a public federal database of cloud‑seeding activities?
Executive summary
NOAA implements the Weather Modification Reporting Act (WMRA) as a data-collection obligation: it collects initial, interim and final reports (Forms 17‑4 and 17‑4A) about weather‑modification activities but does not regulate, permit, fund, or carry out cloud‑seeding itself [1] [2] [3]. Those WMRA filings are archived on NOAA’s Weather Modification Project Reports site and have been the raw material for independent structured datasets covering 2000–2025 and beyond [4] [5].
1. What WMRA reporting actually requires and what NOAA does with the forms
The WMRA requires organizations or individuals intending to modify weather to submit notice to the Department of Commerce (routed to NOAA) at least ten days before operations, and to file interim and final reports summarizing activities — the paperwork is collected as NOAA Forms 17‑4 and 17‑4A and archived for public access [4] [2]. NOAA’s role is archival and disclosure: it compiles and posts the submitted reports, preserves them in repositories such as the NOAA Library and IR, and makes clear it neither oversees nor authorizes the underlying projects [1] [6] [3].
2. How WMRA reporting interacts with state permitting and bans
WMRA is a federal reporting statute, not a federal permitting regime; states retain primary authority to license, run, restrict, or ban cloud‑seeding programs, and some states operate active programs while others have recently moved to prohibit them — for example, Florida passed a ban on cloud seeding and weather modification, illustrating a state‑level regulatory decision that exists independently of NOAA’s reporting duty cloud-seeding-weather-modification-in-florida" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[7] [8]. The federal reporting requirement does not preempt state permits or bans: operators often must comply with both state permitting systems and the WMRA reporting obligation, and failure to file WMRA reports can carry penalties under federal rules even when state permission is obtained geoengineering/frequent-questions" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[9] [10].
**3. Whether there is a public federal database and how complete it is**
Yes — NOAA maintains a public archive of Weather Modification Project Reports (scanned PDFs of submitted Forms 17‑4/17‑4A) on its website, which researchers and journalists have used as the authoritative federal collection of reported activities [1] [4]. That archive is functionally a federal database of reported activities, but it is not a modern, standardized machine‑readable registry: filings are often scanned PDFs with inconsistent formatting, coverage gaps for older records (pre‑2000), and incomplete metadata, prompting outside groups to reprocess and publish structured datasets from NOAA’s documents [4] [5] [10].
4. Gaps, enforcement, and outside efforts to make the record usable
Investigations and academic work show practical gaps: not every state consistently files reports with NOAA, the forms and guidance still assume traditional cloud‑seeding activities while novel geoengineering or solar‑radiation projects strain the definitions in 15 CFR part 908, and NOAA lacks regulatory authority to enforce operational standards — it is the collector and curator, not a permitter or operator [10] [2] [3]. Because NOAA’s public archive is scanned and inconsistently structured, research teams have used automated conversion and large language models to turn NOAA’s documents into structured CSV datasets spanning thousands of reported events [4] [5], a necessary workaround for anyone seeking systematic national analysis.
5. Bottom line: practical interplay and what the public record actually shows
In practice, the WMRA creates a federally centralized reporting trail that complements — but does not replace — state permitting regimes: operators usually must satisfy state permissions and also submit WMRA filings to NOAA, which then publishes those filings as the public federal record, albeit in a format that requires extra work to analyze at scale [4] [7] [3]. The federal database exists and is public, but researchers and policymakers should treat it as a curated archive rather than a polished regulatory registry, and look to state laws and permits for the operative authorizations or prohibitions that govern whether a cloud‑seeding project may proceed on the ground [1] [10] [8].