can anyone please help me related to cloud seeding?? if anyone has a already done report.its related to environmental science.

SUBMITTED BY:
K. Annapurna
Pratyusha
M. Soumya
Vaishali Sharma
V. Jyotika

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Introduction
Cloud seeding, a form of weather modification, is the attempt to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds, by dispersing substances into the air that serve as cloud condensation or ice nuclei, which alter the microphysical processes within the cloud. The usual intent is to increase precipitation (rain or snow), but hail and fog suppression are also widely practiced in airports.
Terpenes are released by trees more actively during warmer weather, acting as a natural form of cloud seeding. The clouds reflect sunlight, allowing the forest to regulate its temperature.
History
Vincent Schaefer (1906–1993) discovered the principle of cloud seeding in July 1946 through a series of serendipitous events. Following ideas generated between himself and Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir while climbing Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, Schaefer, Langmuir's research associate, created a way of experimenting with supercooled clouds using a deep freeze unit of potential agents to stimulate ice crystal growth, i.e., salt, talcum powder, soils, dust and various chemical agents with minor effect. Then one hot and humid July 14, 1946, he wanted to try a few experiments at General Electric's Schenectady Research Lab. He was dismayed to find that the deep freezer was not cold enough to produce a "cloud" using breath air. He decided to move the process along by adding a chunk of dry ice just to lower the temperature of his experimental chamber. To his astonishment, as soon as he breathed into the deep freezer, a bluish haze was noted, followed by an eye-popping display of millions of microscopic ice crystals, reflecting the strong light rays from the lamp illuminating a cross-section of the chamber. He instantly realized that he had discovered a way to change supercooled water into ice crystals. The experiment was easily replicated and he explored the temperature gradient to establish the −40˚C limit for liquid water.
Within the month, Schaefer's colleague, the noted atmospheric scientist Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut) is credited with discovering another method for "seeding" supercooled cloud water. Vonnegut accomplished his discovery at the desk, looking up information in a basic chemistry text and then tinkering with silver and iodide chemicals to produce silver iodide. Together with Dr. Vonnegut, Professor Henry Chessin, SUNY Albany, a crystallographer, co-authored a publication in Science Magazine and received a patent in 1975. Both methods were adopted for use in cloud seeding during 1946 while working for the General Electric Corporation in the state of New York. Schaefer's altered a cloud's heat budget, Vonnegut's altered formative crystal structure – an ingenious property related to a good match in lattice constant between the two types of crystal. (The crystallography of ice later played a role in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle.) The first attempt to modify natural clouds in the field through "cloud seeding" began during a flight that began in upstate New York on 13 November 1946. Schaefer was able to cause snow to fall near Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, after he dumped six pounds of dry ice into the target cloud from a plane after a 60-mile easterly chase from the Schenectady County Airport. Dry ice and silver iodide agents are effective in changing the physical chemistry of supercooled clouds, thus useful in augmentation of winter snowfall over mountains and under certain conditions, and lightning andhail suppression. While not a new technique, hygroscopic seeding for enhancement of rainfall in warm clouds is enjoying a revival, based on some positive indications from research in South Africa, Mexico, and elsewhere. The hygroscopic material most commonly used is salt. It is postulated that hygroscopic seeding causes the droplet size spectrum in clouds to become more maritime (bigger drops) and less continental, stimulating rainfall through coalescence. From March 1967 until July 1972, the U.S. military's Operation Popeye cloud-seeded silver iodide to extend the monsoon season over North Vietnam, specifically the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation resulted in the targeted areas seeing an extension of the monsoon period an average of 30 to 45 days. The 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron carried out the operation to "make mud, not war".
In 1969 at the Woodstock Festival, various people claimed to have witnessed clouds being seeded by the U.S. military. This was said to be the cause of the rain which lasted throughout most of the festival.
One private organization which offered, during the 1970s, to conduct weather modification (cloud seeding from the ground using silver iodide flares) was Irving P. Krick and Associates of Palm Springs, California. They were contracted by the Oklahoma State University in 1972 to conduct such a seeding project to increase warm cloud rainfall in the Lake Carl Blackwell watershed. That lake was, at that time (1972–73), the primary water supply for Stillwater, Oklahoma and was dangerously low. The project did not operate for a long enough time to show statistically any change from natural variations. However, at the same time, seeding operations have been ongoing in California since 1948.
An attempt by the United States military to modify hurricanes in the Atlantic basin using cloud seeding in the 1960s was called Project Storm fury. Only a few hurricanes were tested with cloud seeding because of the strict rules that were set by the scientists of the project. It was unclear whether the project was successful; hurricanes appeared to change in structure slightly, but only temporarily. The fear that cloud seeding could potentially change the course or power of hurricanes and negatively affect people in the storm's path stopped the project.
Two federal agencies have supported various weather modification research projects, which began in the early 1960s: The United States Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation; Department of the Interior) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA; Department of Commerce). Reclamation sponsored several cloud seeding research projects under the umbrella of Project Skywater from 1964 to 1988, and NOAA conducted the Atmospheric Modification Program from 1979 to 1993. The sponsored projects were carried out in several states and two countries (Thailand and Morocco), studying both winter and summer cloud seeding. More recently, Reclamation sponsored a small cooperative research program with six Western states called the Weather Damage Modification Program, from 2002–2006.
Funding for research in the United States has declined in the last two decades. The Bureau of Reclamation sponsored a six-state research program from 2002–2006, however, called the "Weather Damage Modification Program". A 2003 study by the United States National Academy of Sciences urges a national research program to clear up remaining questions about weather modification's efficacy and practice.
An Austrian study to use silver iodine seeding for hail prevention ran during 1981–2000, and the technique is still actively deployed there.
Cloud Seeding Methods
The Beijing Weather Modification Office spent a lot of time researching how to prevent rain in the city during the Aug. 8 opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The government even guaranteed clear skies for the event -- a promise it managed to deliver on. The feat only took the launch of 1,104 rain dispersal rockets from 21 sites in the city to pull off. Even in areas with very low humidity, there's at least some water in the sky and clouds. A rainstorm happens after moisture collects around naturally occurring particles in the air, causing the air to reach a level of saturation at which point it can no longer hold in that moisture. Cloud seeding essentially helps that process along, providing additional "nuclei" around which water condenses. These nuclei can be salts, calcium chloride, dry ice or silver iodide, which the Chinese use. Silver iodide is effective because its form is similar to ice crystals. Calcium chloride is often used in warm or tropical areas. Northern China, where Beijing is located, doesn't receive much rain -- its rainfall levels are 35 percent below the world average, and some of its water supplies are significantly polluted. The area relies heavily on cloud seeding. Zhiang Qiang, who runs the Beijing Weather Modification Office, told the Asia Times that water levels in Beijing's water basins have increased up to 13 percent due to cloud seeding. Cloud seeding also has been used to cool Beijing on hot days.
There are three cloud seeding methods: static, dynamic and hygroscopic.
• Static cloud seeding involves spreading a chemical like silver iodide into clouds. The silver iodide provides a crystal around which moisture can condense. The moisture is already present in the clouds, but silver iodide essentially makes rain clouds more effective at dispensing their water.
• Dynamic cloud seeding aims to boost vertical air currents, which encourages more water to pass through the clouds, translating into more rain. Up to 100 times more ice crystals are used in dynamic cloud seeding than in the static method. The process is considered more complex than static clouding seeding because it depends on a sequence of events working properly. Dr. William R. Cotton, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, and other researchers break down dynamic cloud seeding into 11 separate stages. An unexpected outcome in one stage could ruin the entire process, making the technique less dependable than static cloud seeding.
• Hygroscopic cloud seeding disperses salts through flares or explosives in the lower portions of clouds. The salts grow in size as water joins with them. In his report on cloud seeding, Cotton says that hygroscopic cloud seeding holds much promise, but requires further research.
China has a reputation for launching ambitious projects, from the Great Wall in ancient times to the highest railroad in the world, connecting Qinghai to Tibet. But is the investment in cloud seeding worth it, and can the governments really make it rain whenever it sees the need? On the next page, we'll look at some of the criticism surrounding cloud seeding.
Photograph of burning hygroscopic flares during a experiment
How cloud seeding works
The most common chemicals used for cloud seeding include silver iodide and dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide). The expansion of liquid propane into a gas has also been used and can produce ice crystals at higher temperatures than silver iodide. The use of hygroscopic materials, such as salt, is increasing in popularity because of some promising research results.
Seeding of clouds requires that they contain super cooled liquid water—that is, liquid water colder than zero degrees Celsius. Introduction of a substance such as silver iodide, which has a crystalline structure similar to that of ice, will induce freezing nucleation. Dry ice or propane expansion cools the air to such an extent that ice crystals can nucleate spontaneously from the vapor phase. Unlike seeding with silver iodide, this spontaneous nucleation does not require any existing droplets or particles because it produces extremely high vapor super saturations near the seeding substance. However, the existing droplets are needed for the ice crystals to grow into large enough particles to precipitate out.
In mid-latitude clouds, the usual seeding strategy has been predicated upon the fact that the equilibrium vapor pressure is lower over ice than over water. When ice particles form in super cooled clouds, this allows the ice particles to grow at the expense of liquid droplets. If there is sufficient growth, the particles become heavy enough to fall as snow (or, if melting occurs, rain) from clouds that otherwise would produce no precipitation. This process is known as "static" seeding.
Seeding of warm-season or tropical cumulonimbus (convective) clouds seeks to exploit the latent heat released by freezing. This strategy of "dynamic" seeding assumes that the additional latent heat adds buoyancy, strengthens updrafts, ensures more low-level convergence, and ultimately causes rapid growth of properly selected clouds.
Cloud seeding chemicals may be dispersed by aircraft (as in the second figure) or by dispersion devices located on the ground (generators, as in first figure, or canisters fired from anti-aircraft guns or rockets). For release by aircraft, silver iodide flares are ignited and dispersed as an aircraft flies through the inflow of a cloud. When released by devices on the ground, the fine particles are carried downwind and upwards by air currents after release.
Electronic Cloud Seeding: In recent years a lot of attention has been focused on electronic mechanisms of cloud seeding, one such example utilizes infra-red laser pulses to ionize air and thereby attract condensation from thermodynamic processes. Many countries have dedicated ionosphere research facilities towards the purpose of cloud seeding.
Effectiveness
Referring to the 1903, 1915, 1919 and 1944 and 1947 weather modification experiments, the Australian Federation of Meteorology discounted "rain making." By the 1950s the CSIRO Division of Radio physics switched to investigating the physics of clouds and had hoped by 1957 to better understand these processes. By the 1960s the dreams of weather making had faded only to be re-ignited post-corporatization of the Snowy in order to achieve "above target" water. This would provide enhanced energy generation and profits to the public agencies who are the principal owners. Cloud seeding has been shown to be effective in altering cloud structure and size and in converting supercooled liquid water to ice particles. The amount of precipitation due to seeding is difficult to quantify. Cloud seeding may also suppress precipitation. A key challenge is in discerning how much precipitation would have occurred had clouds not been seeded. Overall, there is general expectation that winter cloud seeding over mountains will produce snow, expressed by professional organizations. There is statistical evidence for seasonal precipitation increases of about 10% with winter seeding.
The US government through its National Center for Atmospheric Research has analyzed seeded and unseeded clouds to understand the differences between them, and has conducted seeding research in other countries.
Clouds were seeded during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing using rockets, so that there would be no rain during the opening and closing ceremonies. Although other disputes claims success.