MAN'S RAIN-MAKING UNSUCCESSFUL

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31381, 29 May 1967, Page 8

MAN'S RAIN-MAKING UNSUCCESSFUL

WASHINGTON, May 28. Man’s efforts to meddle with nature and make rain have so far been a failure, a leading British weather expert said last week.

Mr B. J. Mason, the direc-tor-general of the Meteorological Office at Bracknell, England, told the “water for peace” conference in Washington that rain-making experiments had produced no weather changes that could readily be distinguished from natural variations.

“Exaggerated claims of early years have been discredited,” Mr Mason said in a review of rain-making experiments over the last 15 years.

Seeding small clouds with chemicals such as silveriodide had produced light showers, he said, but there was no convincing evidence that rain could be produced on an economically-useful scale—over hundreds of thousands of square miles. Rain-making in Australia and the United States had been disappointing, showing the need for far greater technological advances, he said. He said a more promising approach to changing the weather would be to alter the supply of radiant energy reaching the earth’s atmosphere from the sun. Building a dense, widespread cloud of dust or ice particles at high levels could cut off some of the sun’s energy from the earth, thereby stemming the rate of water evaporation from the earth’s surface, he suggested.