The single most under-appreciated fact about cloud seeding in the United States: it has been illegal to do it quietly since 1972. The Weather Modification Reporting Act — Public Law 92-205, codified at 15 U.S.C. §330 with regulations at 15 CFR Part 908 — requires every non-federal weather modification activity in the U.S. and its territories to be reported to the Secretary of Commerce before it begins. There is no federal permit; the states permit. The federal government's job is the record, and the record is public.

The filings live in the NOAA Central Library's Weather Modification Project Reports collection, with the documents themselves stored by fiscal year and quarter. Filings follow a naming convention worth learning to read: year, state, and a fragment of the project name — 2025TXST-1 is the South Texas Weather Modification Association's 2025 initial report, 2025COCCMRB-1 the Central Colorado Mountains River Basin program.

Reality check RECORD — the record is real but imperfect: filings are scanned PDFs with no structured data, posted quarterly with up to a ~5-month lag, and a February 2026 GAO review (GAO-26-108013) found more than half of filed reports likely contain errors, with NOAA doing little completeness checking.

This site has started fixing that. Forecast Seed indexes the entire filings corpus — 1,238 filings, 2000 through 2026, each with its year, state, project and a direct link to the filed PDF — as open, machine-readable data: /data/registry/filings.json. The companion program registry — every documented program worldwide, geocoded and evidence-classed — is at /data/atlas/programs.json. Both are free to use with attribution; they are, as far as we know, the only structured versions of this record anywhere.

A forensic reader needs the gaps as much as the files. Four matter:

1. No per-flight public logs. Operators keep detailed seeding logs; regulators can demand them (Texas did in July 2025); the public record gets only seasonal summaries. The independent cross-check is the transponder record — see Forensics. 2. No geocoded generator registry. Utah and Idaho publish generator maps, but only as figures inside PDFs. For Utah this gap has now been closed from the outside: 181 generator sites parsed from the state's own 2024–25 report PDFs (Judy 2026), mirrored at /data/atlas/generators-ut-2024-25.csv — see Forensic Case 002. 3. Prose target areas. Form 17-4 target areas are described in words and attached maps, not polygons. 4. Federal projects are outside the Act. The reporting duty binds non-federal actors; federal research activities report differently.

Three states have now banned weather modification outright — Tennessee (2024), Florida (2025, a felony with fines to $100,000 and a state portal for reporting suspected activity), and Louisiana (2025) — and by 2026 roughly three dozen state legislatures had seen some form of atmospheric-release bill RECORD. Much of this wave legislates cloud seeding (real, small, permitted) together with solar geoengineering (largely hypothetical) under one heading. Whatever one thinks of the policy, it makes the factual record — who actually seeded, where, with how many grams — more valuable, not less. That record is what this site keeps.