rainmaking

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Rainmaking refers to the act of attempting to artificially induce or increase precipitation, usually to stave off drought.

In the US, rainmaking was attempted by traveling showmen. It was practiced in the old west but may have reached a peak during the dust bowl drought of the American West and Midwest in the 1930s. The practice was depicted in the 1956 film The Rainmaker. Attempts to bring rain directly have waned with development of the science of meteorology, the advent of laws against fraud and increased communication technology, with some exceptions such as cloud seeding and prayer.

Since the 1940s, cloud seeding has been used to change the structure of clouds by dispersing substances into the air, potentially increasing or altering rainfall. In spite of experiments dating back to at least the start of the 20th century, however, there is much controversy surrounding the efficacy of cloud seeding, and evidence that cloud seeding leads to increased precipitation on the ground is highly equivocal. One difficulty is knowing how much precipitation might have fallen had any particular cloud not been seeded. Operation Popeye was a US military rainmaking operation to increase rains over Vietnam during the Vietnam War in order to slow Vietnamese military truck activity in the region. China has been making rain for years, while American policy makers and scientists are beginning to take rainmaking seriously once again - they now call it geoengineering - in the hope of combatting global warming (see Guardian 4 November 2009, 'Can we manipulate the weather?').

In many societies around the world rain dances and other rituals have been used to attempt to increase rainfall. European examples include the Romanian ceremonies known as paparuda and caloian. Some Americans also attempt to bring rain during droughts through prayer, a phenomenon particularly common in US farming regions. These rituals differ greatly in their specifics, but share a common concern with bringing rain through ritual and/or spiritual means.

The term is also used metaphorically to describe the process of bringing new clients into a professional practice such as law, architecture or consulting.

See also

• Cloud seeding
• Charles Hatfield
• Cloud-buster
• Rain dance
• Rain Queen

Further reading

• Sanders, Todd 2008. Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania. Toronto, University of Toronto Press

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