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Los Angeles has a new idea for how to combat drought: cloud-seeding. The county plans to spend $800,000 on a plan to increase rainfall in the San Gabriel Mountains by shooting a whole bunch of silver iodide into the air. This may sound like a harebrained scheme to you, but luckily county officials have really thought things through:

Eight hundred thousand dollars should buy a lot of water. But in Los Angeles county, where a recently declared drought is starting to bite, lawmakers plan to spend that much firing silver iodide particles into the sky in the hope of boosting rainfall by as much as 15%.

The county is relaunching a controversial cloud seeding program aimed at increasing precipitation and raising water levels at local reservoirs.

Facing severe water supply shortage, Los Angeles plans to launch a controversial cloud-seeding project that they believe will boost rainfall and raise the levels of local reservoirs, a newspaper report said Monday.

Now in a water drought, Los Angeles County is planning to spend close to a million dollars on scientific magic that supposedly creates rain.

From the cockpit of a Cessna 340 A 10,000 ft. over North Dakota, I watch a bucolic conveyor belt of farming towns scroll below. Then, the whole world goes grayish-white.

"We're just popping through the edge of this cloud bank," says Hans Ahlness, a pilot and vice president of the Fargo-based company Weather Modification, which specializes in teasing rain from the sky. Ahlness points to a mushroom formation a few hundred feet away. "See how that cloud's got a cap on top? That means it's growing fast. That's what we're looking for." As we approach the gray cluster, the plane bounces up and down, like an elevator car on a slack cable. I swallow, fervently willing my breakfast to stay in my stomach. "We're getting a little bit of an updraft from the cloud," Ahlness says calmly, pointing to the altitude gauge on the instrument panel. "See how we're maintaining speed and still climbing?"

With the dry conditions over our South Island hydro lakes continuing (although we do have some rain forecast on Thursday night/Friday morning) it made me think about some research I had done a while ago about cloud seeding.

Could cannons, balloons and high-wire planes send sulfur back into the atmosphere and save the planet? As the Senate debates a controversial climate-change bill, meteorologists and economists alike say geoengineering solutions aren’t so far-out anymore.

Not far from the Dead Dog Saloon, behind a body shop on the main street of Grantsville, Utah, stands a rusting, four-foot-tall metal box. The box sits atop a tank of gaseous silver iodide that, when fired up, sends a plume downwind toward the nearby Oquirrh Mountains.

In theory, the idea is simple: Lower the temperature of the clouds, and scientists could weaken a hurricane or even alter its path. In one scenario, airplanes would spread a layer of soot into the icy clouds at the top of a storm system, cooling them further and slowing the winds. Cut those wind speeds even a little, scientists say, and the devastating power of a storm surge could be drastically cut, perhaps saving lives and property.

As fossil fuel emissions continue to climb, reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth would definitely have a cooling effect on surface temperatures.

In Peking liegt die durchschnittliche Regenwahrscheinlichkeit im August bei 50 Prozent – Niederschläge könnten also gut und gern den Olympia-Athleten Schwierigkeiten machen und den bis zu 91000 Zuschauern im „Vogelnest“ genannten Stadion die Laune verderben. Um das zu verhindern, hat das Wetterveränderungsbüro einen dreistufigen Plan ausgearbeitet. In Stufe eins wird die Situation genau beobachtet. Satelliten, Flugzeuge und Radaranlagen speisen ihre Daten in einen IBM- Supercomputer der Modellreihe p575, den die Behörde im vergangenen Jahr gekauft hat. Die Maschine kann 9,8 Teraflops an Leistung bringen und baut damit ein Modell der 44000 Quadratkilometer großen Region, das im Stundentakt detaillierte Vorhersagen liefert.