China Makes Snow to Fight Drought

China had a snow day on Sunday, all in the name of a drought.

The Wall Street Journal reports that meteorologists seeded clouds with 186 doses of silver iodide so that snow would fall in the city of Beijing. The snow fell from Sunday morning and through the afternoon and was helped by the 29-degree temperatures.

"We wont miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought," Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, told the Xinhua news agency .

The snowfall is the earliest to fall in the capital in 10 years and caused flight delays at Beijing's Capital Airport.

In February Chinese officials seeded clouds with 500 doses of silver iodide, which led to snowfall in Beijing. Officials declared at that time that the drought was nearly over.

Cloud seeding involves using silver iodide, which has been found to have a structure similar to ice. Water droplets from clouds attach to the silver iodide, which then falls as snow if the air is at or below freezing, or as rain if the air is warmer.

But many scientists remain skeptical of the effectiveness of cloud seeding. Arlen Huggins, a cloud-seeding expert, told Scientific American that China's efforts to end its drought by seeding probably won't work. "If they are in a drought, they wouldn't be able to draw enough from cloud seeding, just for the lack of clouds. You treat the storms you have, so cloud seeding certainly isn't going to bring you out of a drought," he said.

The World Meteorological Organization indicates that cloud seeding does work, but depends on factors such as specificity of clouds, wind speed, direction and terrain.