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What did U.S. Forest Service experiments try to learn about silver iodide seeding and lightning storms?
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weather modification
Cloud seeding can produce an extra 5 to 15% of precipitation.
The U.S. Forest Service conducted an extensive program to determine if heavy seeding of potential lightning storms with silver iodide nuclei could mitigate the risk of forest fires.1
The primary goal of these experiments was to prevent the electrical charge within clouds from concentrating to the point where a lightning stroke would occur. While researchers observed that the lightning characteristics of some traveling thunderstorms appeared to change during the trials, the experiments did not conclusively demonstrate that cloud-to-ground lightning could be effectively reduced.21