BATON ROUGE, Ala. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Severe drought, combined with high winds, has already forced hundreds from their homes in California. It's early in the season, and already wildfires are igniting daily. For decades, people have tried to influence precipitation using everything from rain dances to cloud seeding. Now, microbiologists are trying to do something that's never been done before: They're making rain.
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Keeping thousands of nursery plants healthy is part of Jim Massicot's nursery business. He knows when it comes to watering, you can't rely on mother nature.
"When the weathercaster tells us it's going to rain, we kind of believe it, but not always, so we're always prepared to have to water," Massicot told Ivanhoe.
But what if growers and farmers could actually "call" for rain whenever they need it?
"Well, that would be wonderful," Massicot said. "I'd make a lot more profit in this business, I can tell you that."
Microbiologist Brent Christner, Ph.D., a professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, wants to know whether microbes -- the oldest and most plentiful organisms on earth -- could play a role in making rain.
"We know that some of these organisms have the ability to initiate ice formation, and if these microbes are actually present in large numbers in the atmosphere, they can actually be inducing precipitation," Dr. Christner told Ivanhoe.
How do microbes create ice? The same way water condenses around dust in the air to form raindrops, supercooled water attaches itself to the microbes to form ice. Dr. Christner has found freeze-starting microbes in rain and snow from around the world.
High concentrations of certain freeze-inducing microbes on plants and their leaves, blown up into the clouds, might actually trigger precipitation.
"If actually planting crops, which encourage these bacteria to grow, could affect weather, we could use agricultural strategies in a way to actually induce rain," Dr. Christner said.
Rainmaking bacteria may sound promising, but whether it works is a question that could take many more years of research to answer.
The American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
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