“Many countries now use the technology, which has considerably improved during the past 50 years,” a 2001 article said.
On August 15, 1952, one of the worst flash floods ever to have occurred in Britain swept through the Devon village of Lynmouth. Thirty five people died as a torrent of 90m tons of water and thousands of tons of rock poured off saturated Exmoor and into the village destroying homes, bridges, shops and hotels.
The disaster was officially termed “the hand of God” but new evidence from previously classified government files suggests that a team of international scientists working with the RAF was experimenting with artificial rainmaking in southern Britain in the same week and could possibly be implicated.
Squadron Leader Len Otley, who was working on what was known as Operation Cumulus, has told the BBC that they jokingly referred to the rainmaking exercise as Operation Witch Doctor.
His navigator, Group Captain John Hart, remembers the success of these early experiments: “We flew straight through the top of the cloud, poured dry ice down into the cloud. We flew down to see if any rain came out of the cloud. And it did about 30 minutes later, and we all cheered.”
The meteorological office has in the past denied there were any rainmaking experiments conducted before 1955, but a BBC Radio 4 history investigation [see at the end of the article], to be broadcast tonight, has unearthed documents recently released at the public record office showing that they were going on from 1949 to 1955. RAF logbooks and personnel corroborate the evidence.
Until now, the Ministry of Defence has categorically denied knowledge of any cloud-seeding experiments taking place in the UK during early August 1952. But documents suggest that Operation Cumulus was going on between August 4 and August 15 1952. The scientists were based at Cranfield school of aeronautics and worked in collaboration with the RAF and the MoD’s meteorological research flight based at Farnborough. The chemicals were provided by ICI in Billingham....<<<Read More>>>...