Gyres Field Guide Vol 2 - Weather Work

For fifty years, the author has been standing outside in the Alaskan winter, trying to bring in clouds.

This guide is his account of that work and of everything he has since learned about why it probably does not work.

Weather Work covers the physics of how the sky actually operates, from pressure systems and jet streams to the reason a clear winter night in Alaska goes twenty degrees colder than a cloudy one. It examines what humans have genuinely managed to change: cloud seeding, which works but only by about ten percent and only on clouds that were already going to rain; the hurricane-modification program that fooled its own scientists for twenty years; the secret military rainmaking operation that produced an international treaty.

It takes the rainmakers, the cloudbusters, and the large antenna array at Gakona seriously enough to do the arithmetic on them.

And then it turns the same scrutiny on the author's own practice, which is where this series differs from everything else on the shelf: the section on his own experience contains more argument against it than for it.