Silver Iodide Seeding and Radar Echoes from Convective Clouds

Abstract

Summer convective clouds over a fairly isolated mountain range over southeastern Arizona were seeded by means of airborne silver iodide generators. The selection of days to be seeded was made according to a randomization scheme involving pairs of days. A 3-cm vertically scanning radar set was used to observe the maximum echo height over the "target" area at 30 minute intervals. The data so obtained were used to examine the effects of the seeding on the vertical extent of the cloud echoes. Although there is a suggestion that the silver iodide nuclei may have initiated precipitation in some clouds and caused small vertical echo growths, the statistical analyses, for the most part, showed that the observed differences could easily have been caused by chance.