Word: langmuir
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cold is cold enough? Langmuir and Schaefer found by careful experiment that the motes form at -39° C. (38° F.). This explained some types of rain. Certain clouds rise high enough to be cooled to that temperature. Ice motes form, find their way into warmer parts of the cloud, where they grow into snowflakes and fall as snow or rain. "Why not help things along with some dry ice?" asked Langmuir & Schaefer...
...Langmuir soon decided, has other limitations. It affects a cloud only while falling through it, and the ice motes it creates must take effect immediately or they will evaporate. Dr. Bernard Vonnegut, another of Langmuir's bright protégés, was assigned the job of finding some sort of permanent, nonvolatile particles that would hang in the air long enough for ice to form on them...
Softening Opposition. Many authorities did not agree with him. Langmuir's theories have been attacked by the U.S. Weather Bureau, by civilian and military meteorologists. In 1948 the Weather Bureau tried its own cloud-seeding experiments, dumping dry ice and silver iodide into clouds in Ohio. No significant rain fell from them. Langmuir's explanation is that the clouds were the wrong kind in the first place, and that they were greatly overseeded...
Some conservative meteorologists are still arguing with Langmuir & Co. Their position is that all weather effects are produced by the "synoptic situation," the complicated interaction of air masses of varying temperatures, pressure and wind velocity. All "artificial" rain, they insist, would have fallen anyhow, without man's help. The July 1949 rainfall in New Mexico, for instance, they attribute to a front moving in from the Gulf of Mexico...
...Weather Bureau has shown recent signs of softening its opposition. Its chief, Dr. Francis W. Reichelderfer, gives Langmuir and Schaefer full credit for showing how a cloud can be precipitated. Reichelderfer agrees that certain special clouds, such as the cold clouds which form over mountains, can be seeded profitably. But he thinks Langmuir's claims are too sweeping. "My impression," he says, "is that Langmuir and his associates were successful in speeding up the rain formation process in a few cases, but I feel quite sure that in many cases the rain was due to natural causes...