A plane was ‘cloud seeding’ in the Sierra this week to make it rain. Does that actually work?
With Northern California’s traditional rainy season having gone dry, some water and power agencies are taking to the skies in hope of boosting rain and snowfall through a practice known as cloud seeding. Cloud seeding, mostly done with planes, sows rain clouds with a chemical vapor, including silver iodide particles that can bond with moisture, freeze into ice crystals and fall as rain or snow, artificially increasing the amount of precipitation from the clouds.