Weather modification has been done since the 90's that I'm aware of probably longer. I knew some pilots that would get paid to do it, the idea was to spray dust or something into the clouds of sever storms to prevent the hail from getting too large (more particles means the ice forms more rapidly and falls before being pushed 10's of thousands of feet up before coming down as softball hail. So you end up with marble hail over softballs. Farmers would lose a lot of money to hail damage and it was worth paying the pilots to fly into the storms. This was in the upper midwest circa 1993.
Weather modification has been done since the 90's that I'm aware of probably longer. I knew some pilots that would get paid to do it, the idea was to spray dust or something into the clouds of sever storms to prevent the hail from getting too large (more particles means the ice forms more rapidly and falls before being pushed 10's of thousands of feet up before coming down as softball hail. So you end up with marble hail over softballs. Farmers would lose a lot of money to hail damage and it was worth paying the pilots to fly into the storms. This was in the upper midwest circa 1993.
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