Just Subtract Water
After a successful test flight, a Florida firm thinks it’s discovered a way to knock out storms.
Weather Modification Technology has always lagged behind expectations. Cereal magnate C.W. Post, for instance, once tried to wring water from the skies above an arid patch of Texas farmland by sending up giant kites tied to 2-pound charges of dynamite. Tons of TNT—and lots of perfectly good kites —were blown to pieces before he gave up.
Nearly a century later, however, another hopeful entrepreneur may have finally achieved one of humankind’s primal goals. Last July, Peter Cordami commissioned a B-7 Canberratoflyoutofanairport I in Palm Beach, Fla., and dump more than 8,ooo pounds of a mysterious powder into a cloud mass about 30 miles offshore. The cloud vanished from radar screens and, according to a photographer in a chase plane, fell to the ocean’s surface “like snow going down a mountainside” in an avalanche.
The magic ingredient in the powder? An absorbent polymer similar to another substance that Cordani’s manufacturing company, Dyn-O-Mat, puts into mats that soak up oil spills under your car. Now the Dyn-O-Mat CEO is attempting to expand his line with a weather modification product he calls Dyn-O-Gel, which he claims can absorb about 2,500 times its own weight—more impressive, even, than the absorbent filling used in disposable diapers.