Word: langmuir
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...them worked on the principle of spraying dry ice or silver iodide into fat, moisture-laden clouds, forcing them to disgorge their watery vapors which fall as rain. The man behind the principle was an energetic, 69-year-old scientist named Dr. Irving Langmuir...
Until Irving Langmuir began poking into the subject, meteorology was a passive science. Meteorologists observed and tried to forecast the weather, but when asked why they didn't do something about it, they simply looked reproachful. Modern meteorological engineering-the technique of doing something about it-was born four years ago in Langmuir's General Electric laboratory at Schenectady...
...much of the Southwest, power companies, water districts, even farmers and cattlemen are hiring rainmakers to seed the reluctant clouds. Langmuir presented evidence that such overenthusiastic use of silver iodide has already prevented rain in certain areas...
According to Langmuir's theory, silver iodide particles in the right amount will turn a cloud of supercooled (below freezing) water droplets into snowflakes. The flakes sink to warm lower levels, melt and fall as rain. But if there are too many iodide particles competing for the moisture in the water droplets, the snowflakes formed are too small to fall. They may even rise, drifting off as thin cirrus clouds that never yield any rain...
Another danger of the current rainmaking boom in the Southwest is that the silver iodide particles, invisible and almost undetectable, may drift to the humid eastern part of the country (which often has too much rain) and cause damaging floods. Langmuir cannot prove that this has happened; the new technology of "meteorological engineering" is still too young to draw such definite conclusions...