Word: haile
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hailstorm smashed 3,000,000 bushels of standing wheat in Nebraska; another destroyed $2,000,000 worth of tobacco in North Carolina. In a single year, hailstorms can cost U.S. insurance companies tens of millions of dollars. Now, after helplessly enduring bombardments of hail for centuries, man is effectively mounting a counterbarrage of his own. In an 88-page report recently translated into English at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., Russian scientists say that they can suppress hail over large areas by firing antiaircraft shells into hail-producing clouds...
...Splintering. But the theory rarely worked in practice. Before a potential hail cloud could be identified and seeded, its hailstones had already grown large enough to cause damage. The Soviet solution was to use radar to identify the cloud as soon as it began to grow hailstones and deliver the iodides to it within three minutes...
...quick delivery, the Russians developed a non-splintering antiaircraft shell that could accurately deliver a load of silver iodide as far away as 22 miles without scattering dangerous fragments on populated areas below. Selecting locations in the northern Caucasus, Georgia and the Armenian Republic that lie in a Soviet hail belt, the Russians set up enough radar installations and antiaircraft guns to detect and treat clouds over an area of 1,200,000 acres. During 1964 and 1965, thousands of shells were fired into threatening clouds...
During the 1965 trial according to the report, crop loss from hail was reduced to 3.1% in the protected areas, compared with a 19% loss in adjacent unprotected fields. In some areas, the loss was cut to a tenth of normal. Even better results would have been obtained, the Russians admit, had the operation been better planned. As it was, there were frequently shortages of shells, and firing had to be delayed at crucial moments to avoid hitting aircraft...
...scientists are impressed, and hope to stage similar tests in the Great Plains hail belt. Physicist Byron Phillips, a hail expert for the U.S. Environmental Science Services Administration at Boulder, suggests that inexpensive ; rockets might be even more efficient. Eight rocket stations, he says, could protect the entire state of Kansas...