Rainmaker Says He Stops Rain, Too

As an already soaked and soggy University yesterday sopped up more rain, a local rain-god held out hope that he might be able to bring the sun back to Cambridge--temporarily and for a price.

Denying he has had anything to do with the phenomenal rainfall in the past few months, Wallace E. Howell '36, former research associate at the University's Blue Hills Observatory and well-known professional rain-maker, yesterday said he is developing methods which can stop rain as well as start it.

Howell, best known for his cloud-seeding which brought 24 billion gallons of water to a parched New York City in 1950, said he would gladly consider any bids from the University for stopping rain on commencement week, spring weekends or football games. He added, however, that the job would cost something near $10,000 for one day and even then the chances would be only 50-50 that the rain could be prevented.

The rain-maker's services may be at a premium this year, which has started off with the wettest spring on record. In the first four months of 1953 there was a total of 28.46 inches of precipitation (including rain, snow, hail and sleet). This is 15.59 inches over normal. In addition, March was the wettest March and the third wettest month in the 82-year history of the Boston weather bureau. April had more rain than any April since 1933.

The soggy spring has already cost Massachusetts farmers more than a quarter of a million dollars, putting them almost two weeks behind schedule in planting.

Howell, who left his University post last July to devote himself full time to his rainmaking business--W. E. Howell Associates --emphasizes that any large-scale rain-stopping is still on an experimental basis. It has been done successfully in the laboratory, on single cumulus clouds, and accidently while in the process of rain-making.

Actually, the rain-making and rain-stopping operations are very similar.

Rain-making, more accurately called "rain stimulation," is done in two ways either by seeding rain clouds with dry ice (the old method) or with silver iodide crystals (the new method).

The dry ice is dropped into the clouds from planes and, by lowering the temperature of the air, creates small ice crystals or nuclei to which the water drops in the cloud cling. These drops then fall and melt into rain as they near the earth.

The silver iodide crystals are carried into the rain clouds by air currents from ground crystal generators. When the crystals reach the cloud, they serve as nuclei to which the water in the cloud adheres. The advantage of using the crystals is that they attract the water particles at a much higher temperature than the regular ice crystals.

The rain-stopping operation is simply an over-seeding of the clouds with iodide crystals which attract the water particles in the cloud. The heavy crystals then fall as rain and the light ones "blow" off the top of the cloud. This leaves the cloud without water drops and thus in-capable of raining.

"Rain-stopping," therefore, does not exactly prevent the rain; it simply causes the clouds to rain before they come over the area in question.

In order to protect the Cambridge area from rain on a given day, Howell estimated that under normal wind conditions 25 crystal generators would need to be set up on an are from Worcester to Plymouth. These would start to generate when rain-laden clouds, headed toward Cambridge, drifted overhead.

He explained that the rain could only be prevented if the weather conditions were local. If they were state-wide there would be too many Cambridge-bound clouds to be seeded.

Howell said chances of preventing the rain could be increased to 2 to 1 if the University would be willing to pay for an airplane to chase and seed with dry ice those clouds which get away from the generators.

The one fly in the ointment in the rain-stopping business is that other people on whose land the rain falls may bring law suits against the rainmaker. Howell pointed out that these over-seeded clouds do at times result in heavy rains which can cause damage to crops.

Howell said that if the University or any other organization wanted to hire him to keep rain away, it would have to assume all legal liability it such suits were brought