Cloud Tales: Adventures in Scientific Cloud Seeding

by Larry Vardiman

Starbuck is a Rainmaker, not Coffee. A rainmaker with the name of Starbuck in a movie from the '50s starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn arrives in a small western town and, for a fee, offers to end a drought that's plaguing the ranchers and farmers. He offers to seed the clouds with his secret chemicals. Starbuck is a bigger than life figure who promises, "Rain in buckets, rain in barrels, rain in the lowlands, flood in the gullies, and the land will be as green as the Valley of Adam." Starbuck, a swindler and charlatan, eventually brings rain to the parched land and hope to a local maiden and her family whose dreams had dried up. Cloud Tales is a story of modern rainmakers, including yours truly, in the '50s to the '80s who applied scientific methods to seeding clouds and fog, rather than magical potions and incantations. Our efforts to assist clouds release their load of rain or snow at the right time and place, were extremely challenging and fascinating. Come inside the clouds with us and see how hard it is to squeeze moisture from them.

107 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 19, 2019

About the author

Larry Vardiman is a paleoclimatologist retired in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He's published dozens of technical books, articles, and monographs. Now he's pursuing his passion of writing novels in the style of Agatha Christie, Tom Clancy, and Patrick O'Brien. Look for 'Green Bayous', 'Moon Bubbles', 'UCLA Body Stasher', 'White Death', 'The Chicago Boys', and 'Tunnels of Manhattan.'
He's traveled extensively and finds it easy to describe locations and cultures from personal experience. He loves to cook and eat allowing him to include descriptions of mouth-watering meals enjoyed by his detectives, Maurice Bordeau and Anthony Bristol. Last, but not least, he's an anglophile who loves to add humorous interplays between his French and British characters.