Unsettled Weather: The Mixed Reception of Weather, Climate, and the Environment as an Intelligence Issue in CIA

This article examines the US intelligence community treatment of climate, weather, and environmental intelligence from 1946 through the present. It focuses mainly on CIA, which had the charter for producing this intelligence throughout the Cold War. Through analysis of the effects of three Executive-branch scientific review panels and a review of CIA analytic publications on three topics: the Arctic and Antarctic polar regions, Soviet and Chinese weather enhancement experiments, and global natural disaster support, the intelligence community treatment of this topic can be divided into three eras. OSS tradecraft characterizes the first era from 1946 through 1960; increasing geographic information from classified photographic and imaging satellites characterizes the second era from 1960 through 1995, and the use of declassified photography and commercial imagery characterizes the era from 1995 to the present. While the three executive branch review panels drove the resource increases and technical improvements to weather and climate analysis and enabled it to become recognized as a standing intelligence issue in the 2004 reorganization of intelligence collection, the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, subsequent 21st century Presidential administrations have not treated weather, climate, and environmental intelligence consistently. Intelligence priority and resources for this issue have oscillated between attention from Democratic administrations and elimination by Republican administrations.