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Environment

How cloud-seeding could help us predict when it will snow

These brilliant images show how researchers in Switzerland are using weather-modification techniques to understand how ice crystals form in clouds, an important and poorly understood factor in climate and weather models

By James Dinneen

14 March 2025

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

CloudLab researchers use a giant white balloon to hoist a device that measures ice crystals high in the air

CloudLab

Someone taking a walk in the snowy hills near the Swiss capital of Bern last winter would have been perplexed by a giant white balloon rising into the low-lying clouds. Near the hilltop where the balloon was tethered, they would have found a group of researchers launching a drone, then flying it upwind to sprinkle crystals of silver powder into the fog.

“We use the natural cloud as a laboratory,” says  at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, a member…

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