THE RESEARCHERS HAD ALREADY DONE FOUR FLIGHTS,
earlier in January, before they saw the first hints of what they were
looking for. The crew of meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, and
students had converged near Idaho’s Snake River Basin, a
horseshoe-shaped depression between ranges of the Rocky Mountains that
is 125 miles at its widest point. Most of the state’s famous spuds come
from this arable land. Each day that the weather was right—clouds
containing the perfect amount of super-cooled moisture at the ideal
temperature and altitude— the team flew up into the fluff, dropped
silver iodide, and watched to see if they were making more snow than
there would’ve been if they’d stayed home and hung on to their silver.
It’s called cloud seeding. And people have been planting little
chemical seeds into puffy white masses, hoping to change the weather,
for some 70 years. But after all that time, no one knows for sure how
well it actually works: when or even if the practice makes more snow
fall, or how. That’s what the team behind SNOWIE—an acronym for Seeded
and Natural Orographic Wintertime clouds: the Idaho Experiment—had come
to find out.
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