Weather control as a market for space?

Hi Space-Settlers,

the list of economic reasons to settle space is unfortunately very short.

Do you know if anyone did serious studies on the use of orbital mirrors
for weather control? Like having some large mirrors (like von Oberth
suggested) or more probably many smaller ones, that redirect sunlight to
certain spots on earth. I know that the areas lighted by such mirrors
have to be somewhat on the large side. Sun diameter is 1.4 million km,
distance earth sun is 150 mio km. So a perfect mirror at a 400 km orbit
will distribute its light over at least 400*1.4/150 = 5 km on earth. So
anything below 10 km diameter would be unrealistic. But even with this
inaccuracy I'd reckon one could create weather changing effects. (Like:
increase solar input on that area by 20%, ground warms up a few degrees,
air heats up a little and starts to rise. Air from the sides flows
towards the spot.)

Tornadoes, Cyclones etc. do a serious amount of damage every year. Being
able to dampen, dissolve, divert or prevent them before they kill any
people, destroy houses and farms might be worth an investment of some
billion dollars. Yes? If I remember the numbers correct, a single storm
can do as much (financial) damage as was done on september 11th in New York.

A country (or group of counties) able to render such a weather control
service world wide would have a tool of significant international
political influence.

Also selling good weather for special events and some daylight at night
(e.g. to light cities in the evening and in the morning) may be an idea.

Additional thermal input into earth would be small. So environmentalists
shouldn't be bothered by this more than by artificial lakes and
electromagnetic smog by mobile phones. On the contrary, this is only
another way of using clean sun-power. Think about the reduced pollution
if city lights energy consumption can be reduced this way.

I heard of some greenhouses using artificial light to supplement
daylight. Idle time of these mirrors could be used to light grain fields
etc.

Doing such kind of weather control needs a lot of mirrors, so it's a
much bigger market than communication and surveillance satellites. Maybe
it is worth enough to motivate orbital mirror maintenance and production
facilities using lunar materials?

Again my question: do you know of any serious studies on that? Or
reasons why this can't work?

Axel