Word: schaefer
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...first step was taken when G.E.'s Vincent J. Schaefer turned a cloud into snow by pelting it from an airplane with pellets of dry ice (TIME, Nov. 25). G.E. then discovered that dry ice is not necessary.. A child's popgun shot into a supercooled cloud works almost as well. The air expanding out of the gun starts snowflakes forming. One night not long ago, G.E.'s Dr. Bernard Vonnegut walked out of his front door into a below-freezing fog. He fired his popgun once. For 30 feet the fog turned into snowflakes...
Other icemen: Dr. Irving Langmuir and Vincent J. Schaefer of General Electric, the only men who have done anything about the weather. On Nov. 13, they proved that they could turn a cold cloud into snow by sprinkling it with dry ice (TIME, Nov. 25). Last week, Schaefer told of a further triumph. He walked into a cold ground fog swinging a wire basket of dry ice round his head. The fog parted, leaving a lane, as the Red Sea water parted for the Children of Israel...
Both the indoor fog and the outdoor cloud, explained Schaefer, were "supercooled"; their tiny droplets, though well below the freezing point, were liquid water, not ice. They wanted to freeze, but for some reason could not. The dry-ice pellets broke the deadlock. "An almost infinite number" of submicroscopic "ice seeds" formed near their surface. These grew into snowflakes at the expense of the water droplets. The supercooled cloud precipitated...
Planned Storms. The "latent heat" liberated by the freezing of the water produced turbulence in the cloud, spreading the reaction through its mass. Schaefer figured that a single pellet falling 2,000 feet through a cloud might produce several tons of snow. Snowmaking will not cure droughts over large areas. It cannot conjure moisture out of an atmosphere which contains too little to precipitate. But possibly farmers in irrigated districts may coax more snow to fall on the mountain areas which feed their ditches...
...city governments will watch Schaefer with hope. New York, for instance, has paid over $7,000,000 in a single winter to clean snow from its streets. If artificial snowmaking proves effective, meteorologists will watch for supercooled clouds bearing down on a city. Airplanes will give them the dry ice treatment, making them dump their snow outside the city limits. Perhaps, if ski-minded, the weathermakers can shunt the snow to winter resorts...