OnEarth Fall 2013

Page 40

silver-linin

Scorned for years as the stuff of science fiction, cloud seeding could

shoot for the sky A cloud-seeding generator station sits atop Ward Peak in the Sierra Nevada range.

A

ny time he wants, Arlen Huggins can generator from his desk. Its purpose is to build better clouds. Weather modification is one of the least understood environmental find out if he’s making it snow in Colorado. From his desk in a spacious, sunny office in Reno, practices going on today. Mention it at a cocktail party and people will Nevada, Huggins can pull up a screen on his say, “That’s not real, is it?” Others will launch into perfervid specucomputer and look at charts tracking relative lations about “chemtrails” and secret global “weather wars.” They humidity, temperature, wind direction, and may quote shock jock Alex Jones, who expressed surprising faith in government competence by suggesting the feds could wind speed at the Winter Park By have manufactured the recent Oklahoma tornadoes. But ski area, about an hour and a half west of Denver. weather mod, as industry folks call it, is neither myth nor The charts also show him the flow rate and flame ginger conspiracy. It’s a pretty standardized practice that’s been temperature for a silver iodide generator perched near strand used since the 1950s. Huggins’s employer, the Desert the resort’s 12,000-foot summit. He can control the

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fall 2013


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