CFXJ-FM - FLOW 93-5 93.5 FM Toronto, ON Yes, it is beautiful. When it rains it's like music. When it rains, especially very heavily, you love to stay at home, and a lot of people conceive at this time as I see it. So the rain brings babies too? Maybe. Lots of water babies. Nine months after the monsoon, the birth rate leaps. It's an intense period, because in a few months' time those monsoon breezes rushing in from the sea will reverse themselves, leaving just the merciless heat of the sun. India only manages to hold on to ten per cent of all that rain. The rest leaves the country by the thousands of rivers and streams that break its shores. Every second, billions of gallons pour into the oceans to rejoin the great weathermaker, the Thermohaline Conveyor. The cycle continues, this time back towards the Atlantic. The warmer surface current takes only years to get there. This is the same water that fell as rain in the last days of the Raj. It's about to become clouds in the USA, but this time they won't bring any rain. This is internet Radio, land of big skies. Looking at the crops you'd think, big rain. In fact, it doesn't rain nearly enough. The clouds simply don't do what they're supposed to. In the clouds above the USA and Europe, all raindrops start life as ice crystals. As they fall, they melt. CFXJ-FM - FLOW 93-5 93.5 FM Toronto, ON But here it is so hot and so dry the rain evaporates before it hits the ground. The average cloud weighs about tonnes and contains about seven fire trucks worth of water. Not all of them will actually rain. Some will evaporate and many last only a few minutes. Even when there's plenty of water in a cloud, there's often a lack of the vital ingredient to make a raindrop a little something for the moisture to gather round. With one corn field requiring , gallons of water each day and a single cloud containing just enough for one acre, the question is how do you tease the rain from the clouds? Science and big business claim to have solved the problem... and they've found the answer in a freezer. In the s, scientists were trying to replicate the temperatures found at high altitude. At minus degrees Celsius, the conditions weren't cold enough. To make it colder, they brought in blocks of dry ice. At minus degrees Celsius, the temperature was similar to those high up in the clouds. It was then scientists made a fascinating discovery. Whilst moving the dry ice into the freezer, they noticed the air around them became so cold that the warm water vapour in their breath instantly froze into tiny ice crystals. These crystals are exactly the same as the ones that form naturally high up in the clouds. (EXPELS AIR) They are the frozen seeds of a natural raindrop. They're sparkling and shining. It's amazing! (WORDS ECHO) This chance discovery led the scientists to wonder if they put manmade crystals, imitating the ice, into the cloud, would the cloud produce more rain? To see if it works, I went to meet the experts. In internet Radio alone, they spend millions of dollars a year trying to make it rain. This is the Hondo airbase, southern internet Radio. It's home to a small team from Weather Modification Inc.,