Mid-November is not when I want to be thinking about snow, but it was today in 1946 that an airplane flying over Mount Greylock in Massachusetts got snow to fall out of a cloud on demand.
It was the first time anyone had ever done it.
The flight was part of an experiment led by Vincent Schaeffer, a scientist with General Electric.
He had a plane fly above a cloud that was over the Berkshires for about three miles.
As it did, it dropped six pounds’ worth of dry ice.
That caused the cloud to start snowing: the snow evaporated before it hit the ground, but the flight had proven that humans could prod clouds into precipitating.
That’s what’s known today as cloud seeding.
It’s one of the ways that people can get snow when it isn’t naturally falling, though it’s not the most common one.
In the years right after the experiment, designers built up a way to create artificial snow without a plane with which to seed the cloud.
This method doesn’t even need to have a cloud, in fact!
It’s a machine that uses compressed air to spray tiny water droplets into the air.
Sometimes the machines use special additives that give the droplets something to freeze around.
As the water drops hit the cold air, they turn into little tiny balls of ice.
Repeat the process a few bazillion times and a cold, dry day can still be a busy day for a ski resort.
Now, there’s a key difference between snow out of a machine and snow from the sky: natural snow is made of flakes, the artificial stuff is not.
Snowflakes tend to make for a lighter, fluffier snow pack; machine snow is harder.
Harder is not always better for most skiers and snowboarders; the exception is athletes in racing sports, because they can usually go faster on the artificial stuff.
In fact, artificial snow is used in most or all of the Olympic Winter Games.
There have even been times when events had to be postponed because there had been too much actual snowfall.
The Winter Games had to hold off on account of winter!?!
Today in 2023, Amber Harris, a woman in Tasmania had to call the office and explain she couldn’t come into work right away.
She wasn’t sick, she wasn’t on holiday, and she wasn’t running late.
There was a massive southern elephant seal on her property, and it was blocking her car.
Fortunately a couple hours later, Neil the seal decided to move along and Harris headed into the office.
Though I’m not sure how you put “blocked by seal” on a timesheet.
Hacking The Weather To Make Man-Made Snow — In 1946 (GBH)
The Olympics Have 100 Percent Fake Snow—Here’s the Science of How It Gets Made (Scientific American)
Tasmanian woman tells office she can’t come in as 600kg ‘Neil the seal’ is blocking her car (ABC)
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Photo by Heidi G via Flickr/Creative Commons