Word: cumulus
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Reluctant Clouds. In arid regions like New Mexico, Langmuir explained, big cumulus clouds often rise high in the air without dropping any rain. In such cases, the air does not contain enough natural nuclei (suitable dust particles) for moisture to condense upon. The warm air from over a sun-heated plain boils upward vigorously, but the moisture in it does not condense until the cold upper levels are reached. Then it condenses suddenly into very small ice particles that drift off at about 35,000 feet, leaving the ground dry, its inhabitants disappointed...
Project Cirrus (a joint cloud study program of the services and G.E.) has been very successful, said Dr. Langmuir. Thirty-five of its cloud-seeding flights changed super cooled clouds* into ice or snow crystals. Last October, at Albuquerque, two large cumulus clouds were sprinkled with dry ice. They turned into a furious thunderstorm that drenched Albuquerque with heavy rain at a time of year when rain is uncommon...
...experiments on the towering cumulus clouds of summer, results were hardly better. Seventy-nine of them got the dry-ice treatment, but only 18 produced any rain; in all cases except five, rain was already falling within 30 miles. Even in these five cases, there was natural rain 40 to 60 miles away...
From his plane window 20 miles off, Radiological Monitor Bradley saw the "huge column of clouds, dense, white, boiling up through the strato-cumulus." The next move in Operation Crossroads was his; and a few minutes later he and his plane were flying toward Bikini Atoll and the "evil mushrooming" column...
Over Jupiter Island, north of Palm Beach on Florida's east coast, a stiff wind was blowing. It rattled the palm trees with a sound like distant machine guns, piled huge stacks of cumulus clouds in front of the sun. From the sea, a salty film of spindrift swept over the cluster of snug beach houses. In one of them last week, sitting intently by his radio, Under Secretary of State Robert Abercrombie Lovett listened to the President's undramatic announcement of a dramatic new turn in U.S. foreign policy...