Modern Rainmaking Ask Dave a weather question

Dave Thurlow, Host

 

Charles Hatfield

In the last hundred years, there have been some pretty wacky attempts to convince rain or snow to fall. Up until 1946 nothing much worked. But rainmaking, or cloud seeding as it's called, IS successful these days and is used to increase rain and snow fall, and to clear fog, mostly in western parts of the U.S. This success is due to work done on Mount Washington in the 1940's by scientist Vincent Schaefer. Schaefer found that tiny particles of dry ice dispersed in a cloud would act like seeds or nuclei, growing snowflakes. Meanwhile, Dr. Bernard Vonnegut was discovering that a chemical nucleus produced the same results as dry ice particles.

But even with these sucesses the story of rainmaking wouldn't be complete with the rather unfortunate true tale of Charles Hatfield. Hatfield was a self-proclaimed cloud attractor and in 1915, the city of San Diego offered him 10,000 dollars to end the local drought. By setting up a series of towers toped with boiling vats of chemicals, he claimed that he could bring enough rain to fill the reservoirs. And he did! It worked! Not only did the reservoirs fill, but the rivers flooded, the dams burst and dozens of people died. The city blamed this coincidental tragedy on Hatfield, who of course had nothing to do with it, and ran him out of town, without his 10,000 dollars.

For additional information on rainmaking, succesful or not, be sure to visit our website, which is weathernotebook.org. Our show is underwritten by Subaru with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.