Post for Meteorologists: Why Do Weather Researchers Do the Same Project Over and Over and Over and Over??

Bear with me while I provide a little background information.....

In the 1960's, Dr. Stan Changnon of the Illinois State Water Survey noticed that a volunteer weather station downwind of Chicago reported far more precipitation, especially snow, than other weather stations in the area. This unusual weather condition was called the "LaPorte (Indiana) Weather Anomaly" and it lasted from the 1930's to the 1960's. He believed it was caused by air pollution from Chicago increasing the amount of precipitation downwind of the city. 

Like so many discoveries in weather science, it caused a great deal of controversy even though the data was solid. Dozens of articles and commentary articles were written. 

Via Grok, tiny sample of papers on this topic.

To help determine whether cities could actually modify the weather near and downwind of their location, the "Metromex" project in St. Louis was established from 1971 to 1975. 

Metromex clearly showed an increase in rainfall and thunderstorms (which included, of course, lightning) in the counties just east of the Mississippi River in Illinois. 

Interestingly, the LaPorte weather station showed less of an anomaly in more recent years. While some attributed it to "changing jet stream patterns," the far more likely explanation is the decreased amount of air pollution due to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, et cetera. 

With that background, I read a paper Thursday evening regarding modeling increased precipitation and related phenomena around Houston due to urban effects. 

The "plain language summary" states:

Essentially, they learned exactly the same things that Metromex learned 50 years ago. 

Why am I bringing this up? It seems I have read this same result dozens of times before. 

I went to the Grok AI program and asked, 

How many scientific papers show that urbanization increases precipitation near large cities?

The answer?

So, I have indeed read it dozens of times and perhaps far more. My question is why? With so many critical questions related to weather and climate facing society, why do researchers in our field keep telling what we have known for 50 years? This is a tremendous waste of brainpower and, as most of these are funded by tax dollars, of our money. 

C'mon fellow weather scientists. We can do much better than repeating this same study over and over.