We Asked To Use The Weather Weapon. They Sent Us A Form.

GAKONA, Alaska — The open day is on a Saturday in June, it is advertised on the facility's website four months in advance, and it has a car park.

Two hundred and eleven people came. Our correspondent was one of them and paid the same nothing everyone else paid.

What is published

The transmission schedule. This newspaper has archived it monthly since 2019, and it has never been retroactively edited in eighty-five months of checking — a fact worth more than any assurance, because it is checkable and we have been checking.

The schedule gives campaign windows, frequencies, and the principal investigator's name and institution for each. Four slots this year are marked "reserved". We asked; we were told they are weather contingency; we have not been able to verify that independently and we are saying so.

The proposal

Anybody may propose an experiment. The form is on the website.

Our correspondent submitted one in March, under her own name, with the affiliation field left blank because she has none. It asked for a 2.8 MHz heating campaign to test a specific and rather narrow question about artificial airglow.

It was rejected in May. The assessment is printed below in full and is worth reading, because it does not reject her for being a journalist — it says so in terms — and because it tells her, specifically, what to do to succeed next time, which is to find a diagnostic partner, two of which it names.

She is doing that. If a campaign happens, this newspaper will report it, including if it produces nothing.

Who came to the open day

Our correspondent talked to eleven of the two hundred and eleven and asked them all the same question: why are you here?

Four were locals who come every year. Two were radio amateurs, one of whom has bounced signals off the array's artificially heated patch and had the QSL card in his jacket. Two were parents with children who wanted to see something large. One was a physics teacher.

Two came because they believe the array is used for weather modification and wanted to look at it.

Both were shown around by Dr. Bronwyn Adeyemi-Sato personally, for forty minutes, and asked her a great many pointed questions, and she answered all of them at length and without visible irritation, which our correspondent — who has been on the other end of many press offices — found remarkable enough to write down.

"They asked good questions," Dr. Adeyemi-Sato said afterwards. "The one about power density was a genuinely good question and I was glad to be asked it, because the number is the answer and the number is public."

The number

The array radiates 3.6 megawatts.

That is a lot for a transmitter and it is nothing at all for weather. A modest thunderstorm dissipates on the order of 10¹³ watts. The array is roughly seven orders of magnitude short, and the energy it does put up is deposited in a region of the atmosphere that has almost nothing in it, which is the entire reason the facility is useful for the ionospheric physics it exists to do.

Dr. Adeyemi-Sato said she gives that comparison about forty times a year and has never once had anybody argue with the arithmetic.

"They usually say: then why is it secret," she said. "And I say: it isn't, the schedule is on the website, you can come in June. And a surprising number of them come in June."