NASA Scientists Admit Airplanes Really Do Seed Rain Clouds

In July 2011, NASA published an article on “Hole Punch” clouds. The phenomena were observed sometime in the 1940s. A paper published in Science a week before the NASA article identified the “culprit” as airplanes. Furthermore, the paper examined the “potential for the phenomenon’s link to increased precipitation around major airports”.
The research was “partly funded by NASA grants” and one of the co-authors of the paper was NASA Langley Research Center cloud specialist Patrick Minnis. The lead author was Andrew Heymsfield from the National Center for Atmospheric Research located in Boulder, Colorado.

The scientists studied various satellite images of clouds with hole punches. They then created a computer model that recreated holes and how these formations evolved. They learned that various aspects of a climbing plane and the level it was flying determined whether it was a hole or a canal dug into the cloud.

Part of the examination of the physics of hole punches in specific clouds was the question of “inadvertent cloud seeding”. Heymsfield stated, “It [hole punch in clouds] appears to be a rather widespread effect for aircraft to inadvertently cause some measureable amount of rain or snow as they fly through certain clouds.”

Heymsfield went on to say that hole punches don’t necessarily produce “enough precipitation to affect global climate, but it is likely to be noticeable around major airports in the mid-latitudes.” Minnis said that in the right conditions, a hole punch can generate a “somewhat continuous snow line” that was observed near the Denver airport.

China Claims Intentional Cloud-Seeding Success

Scientific American reported in February 2009 that China claimed it had created a snow storm through cloud seeding in its efforts to alleviate drought conditions in Hebei, the northern province of Beijing (2).

Reuters reported that Chinese engineers “blasted more than 400 cigarette-size sticks of silver iodide into the sky shortly before the storm.” The news organization also reported that an unidentified senior engineer said the procedure was responsible for making the snow “a lot heavier.”

Scientific American referred to Reno Desert Research Institute’s cloud-seeding expert Arlen Huggins:

Attributing one storm to seeding is very difficult unless the cloud system is incredibly simple, like fog that has no chance of precipitation. If you see snowfall then, that’s pretty demonstrative evidence that you succeeded,” he said.

NASA devotes a page on its Earth Observatory section to UCLA Professor Joanne Simpson. In 1960, Simpson created a computer model that predicted how clouds react to the silver iodide used in cloud seeding experiments (3).

Simpson’s model revealed that the “large amount of latent heat released as the cloud’s water droplets changed to ice would, under certain conditions, cause a cloud to grow much taller and to more than double in size compared to an unseeded cloud.”

She was able to test her model’s accuracy in 1963. She bootlegged “aircraft time during Project Stormfury, a weather modification experiment started in 1961 by Simpson’s future husband, Bob Simpson.”

She was able to send flares that “ignited and created silver iodide smoke, which dispersed silver iodide fairly evenly over clouds. The clouds behaved just as her cloud model predicted.” One year later, Simpson “left UCLA to take a position with the National Weather Bureau” (later renamed to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

She later concentrated on cloud seeding and worked on project FACE (the Florida Area Cumulus Experiment). Underfunded, the project never fully developed. Simpson later took a position at the Laboratory for Atmospheres at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center leading the “The Severe Storms Branch”.

Hole Punch Clouds and Silver Iodide Cloud Seeding

Evidence shows that both hole punch clouds and silver iodide cloud seeding creating participation either as rain or snow.

Some people believe that this technology was perfected long ago.

Others follow the publications that give encouragement that such efforts could one day end world-wide droughts.

Still others believe weather control was accomplished through the now defunded HAARP program. What do you believe?