Snowstorms … in a lab

Although the idea of shooting chemicals into the sky to boost rain dates back to the 1800s, an American research chemist and meteorologist named Vincent Schaefer developed cloud seeding in the mid-1940s. Schaefer was a self-taught chemist – although he never completed high school, he managed to invent cloud seeding in 1946 while working at General Electric research lab. Schaefer was studying cloud physics, precipitation static, and icing on aeroplanes, and ended up creating the first human-made snowstorm in a lab. According to his New York Times obituary, he was the first person to do something about the weather, and not just talk about it. It goes on to say that Schaefer wanted to fight drought, control storms, reduce hail, quench forest fires, and even guarantee a white Christmas.

A few years after his initial discovery, Schaefer flew over Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, seeding clouds with pellets of dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) to produce the first fabricated snowstorm. His ‘supercooled’ clouds became the foundation of precipitation augmentation, which is why Schaefer is now considered the father of cloud seeding.

Corals are extremely important in marine habitats. Cloud brightening is an attempt at creating reflective clouds, to direct sunlight away from Earth, thereby cooling the oceans and hopefully reducing bleaching.