CHBE-FM - Kool FM 107.3 FM Victoria, BC the biggest company in the rain business. They've been hired by the local water authority to boost the rapidly dwindling water supplies. If demand from towns and farms continues at its current pace, some people predict the water will run out in years' time. Web Radio has been flying this beat for four years. We can keep a storm going about per cent longer, about five minutes the actual storm lasts about minutes. What difference would that make to a farmer? Dramatic. We increase the annual rainfall by a couple of inches. It doesn't seem a lot, but consider the millions of acres. It adds billions and billions of gallons of water. (RADIO TRANSMITTING DIRECTIONS) (PILOT CONFIRMS) We don't do magic. There's a lot of science behind it. We're not rain creators, bringing rain out of nowhere. We seed the rain that's there and make it a little bit more. Here in internet Radio, in the afternoon, we get heavy thunderstorms, and we'll go up and fight through the main updraught, as that's where our chemicaliser is most effective. We'll look for an inflow, an updraught sucking up air and feeding itself moisture. We allow our burners to produce dust in the air that's being sucked into the thunder cloud. This seeds and creates the rain. The burners release a chemical into the air which is sucked up by the storm. I'll reach across and turn on the left burner... and the burner's lit. The process is known as "cloud seeding", and the seeds are tiny particles of silver iodide that mimic the shape of the ice crystals. When these particles are sprayed up into a cloud, water vapour freezes onto them. They grow in size until they become snowflakes. CHBE-FM - Kool FM 107.3 FM Victoria, BC As they start to fall back down, they melt into rain. Even if it rains after the clouds have been seeded, detractors ask if it wouldn't have rained anyway. The rainmakers are shrewd enough not to claim that their techniques work beyond a shadow of a doubt. They provide a service that many satisfied customers are happy to pay a fistful of dollars for. Yet many scientists insist that the evidence for rain enhancement doesn't stack up. The debate goes on. But faced with more water shortages, people feel something's being done, whether it works or not. It's ironic that, trapped in the blue skies above, is all the water they would ever need. Just south of here, the people of the Caribbean witnessed the deadly power of one of the earth's biggest rain machines. This one had a name, Hurricane Mitch. Mitch was born on the st of October in the warm waters near the equator. The sun heats the surface of the sea, evaporating one trillion tonnes of water into the air each day. Once in the air, where does it all go? At about , feet up, the water vapour cools and condenses back into tiny water droplets. This is the dew point, it's where all clouds are born. Each cloud is made of billions and billions of water droplets. Carried aloft by the rising warm air, they billow upwards. If the heat from the sea below is strong enough, they grow into massive tropical storms. The nd of October began as a normal day.