Rainmaking

Rainmaking, also known as artificial precipitation or artificial rainfall, is the act of attempting to artificially induce or increase precipitation, usually to stave off drought. According to the clouds' different physical properties, this can be done using airplanes or rockets to sow to the clouds with catalysts such as dry ice, silver iodide and salt powder, to make clouds rain or increase precipitation, to remove or mitigate farmland drought, to increase reservoir irrigation water or water supply capacity, or to increase water levels for power generation.

In the United States, rainmaking was attempted by traveling showmen. It was practiced in the old west, but may have reached a peak during the dust bowl drought of the American West and Midwest in the 1930s. The practice was depicted in the 1956 film The Rainmaker. Attempts to bring rain directly have waned with development of the science of meteorology, the advent of laws against fraud and increased communication technology, with some exceptions such as cloud seeding and forms of prayer including rain dances, which are still practiced today. Prayer for more rain is also a cross cultural practice in Christians and Muslims in areas where people keep "traditional" non-scriptural religions. In the Christian areas the Defteras (learned clerics of the Orthodox Christian Church) believed to have the wisdom to arrest the rain, to bring hail to farms of individuals who refuse to comply with religious rules as well as to bring more rains when the rainy season fell short of giving the usual amount of rain needed for growing cereals.

Rainmaking (ritual)

Rainmaking is a weather modification ritual that attempts to invoke rain.

Among the best known examples of weather modification rituals are North American rain dances, historically performed by many Native American tribes, particularly in the Southwestern United States. Some of these weather modification rituals are still implemented today.

Examples

North America

Julia M. Butree (the wife of Ernest Thompson Seton) describes the rain dance of the Zuni, along with other Native American dances, in her book The Rhythm of the Redman. Feathers and turquoise, or other blue items, are worn during the ceremony to symbolize wind and rain respectively. Details on how best to perform the Rain Dance have been passed down by oral tradition. In an early sort of meteorology, Native Americans in the midwestern parts of the modern United States often tracked and followed known weather patterns while offering to perform a rain dance for settlers in return for trade items. This is best documented among the Osage and Quapaw Indian tribes of Missouri and Arkansas.