![]() Similarly, hygroscopic seeding is a technique for warm clouds, wherein a simple salt helps encourage water droplets to collide and produce rain. When more particles collide, ice crystals are formed, and soon the cloud is full of heavy water droplets that become rain. Scientists still aren’t exactly sure how it works, but it’s possible that ice easily bonds with silver iodide because they both have similar structures at the molecular level. Back in 1946, Bernard Vonnegut (author Kurt’s brother) was one of the researchers at General Electric who discovered that silver iodide could help clouds form ice crystals. Glaciogenic seeding is a technique for squeezing water from cold clouds. Adding a “seed” gives clouds a boost by creating ice nuclei that grow faster and bigger than normal. When enough of these cloud droplets combine, they grow bigger until they are heavy enough that they fall to the ground in some form of precipitation, determined by the temperature and other conditions. Normally, when air rises into the atmosphere, it cools and forms particles called ice nuclei, which clump together to form clouds. Air already contains water vapor, but cloud seeding can encourage the water to condense until it falls from the sky. So, what is cloud seeding?Ĭloud seeding adds substances to clouds by shooting them from the ground or dropping them from planes. The idea is not to create clouds out of thin air, but to squeeze every last drop of rain from naturally occurring clouds. ![]() ![]() Private companies and state-sponsored groups have even used cloud seeding to drop fresh snow on ski mountains and to squeeze out the rain before major events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Scientists use weather modification to enhance rainfall and increase water supplies, to disperse fog and to minimize hail during storms. This technique is not perfect, and it can’t solve chronic drought, but it’s relatively inexpensive and many communities around the world are desperate for water. In other words, a silver bullet can make it rain. Cloud seeding, the most common way to modify weather, involves shooting silver iodide or other chemicals into clouds to encourage precipitation. Farmers have long wished they could control the rain, and now weather manipulation can do just that. ![]()
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