Did you know that it's possible to artificially create rain?

I didn't.

But the technology has actually been around for decades.

It's called cloud seeding.

Cloud seeding was invented in 1946 by General Electric Scientists in upstate New York.

And what they were trying to do was to find a solution to the icing on airplane wings.

That's our colleague Chris Marr.

And they discovered that when they put dry ice into clouds and a simulated experiment,

it produced ice crystals like snow.

So it really was a way to squeeze more water,

more moisture out of clouds

than would traditionally be falling naturally.

Typically, the way it works is an airplane flies

into a bunch of clouds

and releases a type of salt called silver iodide.

The water particles attached to the tiny bit of salt and form rain or snow.

What I discovered in kind of looking back through the history of cloud seeding was that in the 70s,

that was kind of considered the heyday, it was used much more commonly, but the usage fell off.

That's because it was hard to measure how well cloud seating was working.

The technology still had a ways to go.

And it also seemed a little unnatural to some people. It does have that sort of mysterious element to it that you can affect natural weather know, natural weather systems, things in nature.

Also, people have questions about whether people should interfere with nature, you know,

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