“When we first had the idea we did research,” she says, “and we didn’t see any negative impacts. It is these precedents that give Natasja Rasmussen at Oliver’s Travel hope for the company’s new service, which for logistic reasons is limited to couples planning weddings in France. They fired 21 silver iodide rockets into the Beijing skies in 8 August 2008, four hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The Russians seed clouds to ensure bright skies for their three major celebrations of the year: Victory Day, City Day and Russia Day. For years the Russian government has made use of this science as part of its well-known weather control programme. Instead of the anticipated deluge, the silver iodide was dispersing the rain drops, or, in the terminology now used by Oliver’s Travel, “bursting” it.Īlthough not what was initially intended in the 1940s, scientists realised that this process – an ability to prevent rain – was equally useful. While it did induce the ice crystals, the drops of water that fell from seeded clouds were often so small that they evaporated before they reached earth. It turned out that scientists had misunderstood the effect of silver iodide. They found that there was actually a better chance of decreasing rainfall than increasing it.” Eventually the US government were forced to carry out proper trials. It often ended up with farmers suing companies – they had been promised rain and it never came. “There were lots of companies in North America,” he says, “and their intention was to make it rain. John Thornes, professor emeritus of applied meteorology at the University of Birmingham, remembers these rain experiments of the 1960s. They reached a zenith during the Vietnam war when the US government allegedly conducted their highly classified Operation Popeye, an attempt to extend the monsoon season by cloud seeding in the hope of flushing out the Viet Cong. In the post-war years experiments in rain creation were rife on either side of the Atlantic. The science of cloud seeding dates from the forties, and the work of US chemist Vincent Schaefer. Tweaking the atmosphere to bring rain to order may seem so outlandish that it belongs to some dystopian future, but in reality it is nothing new.
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