Scientist Dr Berhard Vonnegut, he didn’t want to use dry ice to make the clouds colder for cloud seeding to work. He wanted to use a chemical to carry out the process. His idea was based on the condensation property of water. Something that you may not know is that the process of condensation has a condition. To convert water vapour into water, to undergo the process of condensation, a non-gaseous surface is required. That is, a solid or liquid surface is required to complete the process of condensation.
If there is no surface, condensation cannot happen. It is said that without this surface, water vapour will remain as water vapour even if the temperature falls to -10°C. You may say that we claimed earlier in the video that water vapour condenses when the air cools. How can that happen without any surface? There is a surface, of course. The small dust particles in our atmosphere, the pollens floating around in the air, act like surfaces to carry out the condensation process for clouds to form.
The thing is, the better the surface, the faster and better would condensation be. A practical example is in your bathroom. When you take a shower if there are glasses surfaces around the shower area, you can see condensation on the glass. The water droplets collect on it. Or when there’s high humidity. You might have noticed that in winter, around the corners of windows, there is a lot of condensation, water droplets form there because there is a lot of humidity inside the house, high water vapour content in air so, the water vapour condenses when it meets the cold glass on the windows. And that glass provides a surface for the condensation.
