Word: clouding
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...well-known silver iodide and Dry Ice methods of cloud precipitation work only on clouds that are well below freezing. Warm clouds are common,too. and Dr. Florence W. van Straten of the Naval Weather Service reasoned that they should precipitate if some of their droplets could be made warmer than the others...
...problem was how to heat the droplets differentially. Dr. van Straten solved it with carbon black, which is a fluffy kind of soot whose intensely black particles, about 500.00 in diameter, accumulate radiant heat just like a blacktop road. When these particles are released in a cloud, she reasoned, the water droplets that capture one or more of them should grow warmer by absorbing sunlight, and should lose their moisture by evaporation to droplets that have stayed comparatively cool because they have captured no particles. Then the cool, fattened-up droplets should fall slowly through the cloud, growing gradually bigger...
...actual fact, the Navy announced last week. It was tested last July over the coast of Georgia. The usual tactic was to attach a package of 1-2 Ibs. of carbon black to a static line and toss it out of an airplane flying through the top of a cloud. When the slack snapped out of the line, the package broke open, releasing the carbon black. Seven clouds out of seven tested dissipated entirely in 2½ to 20 minutes...
When carbon black is released in moist, cloudless air the effect is opposite but no less magical. Its black particles catch sunlight and heat the air between them. The heated air rises, expands and grows colder. Some of its moisture condenses, and a new, white cloud appears in the sky. This system will not form clouds in dry air, but when the air is moist enough, it works almost every time. The official Navy attitude is that the action of carbon black is "an interesting effect" that will have to be studied a great deal more before...
Rimbaud was indisputably the damnedest of the damned, but his biographies cloud into vagueness just as they become most fascinating. At 19, after four years of systematic "derangement" and blazing creation, Rimbaud wrote his bitter valedictory, A Season in Hell, then abandoned poetry-and his homosexual menage with Poet Paul Verlaine. During the next 18 years, until his death in 1891, he left only traces of wanderings that took him to Stuttgart as a teacher, to Java with the Dutch army, to Abyssinia as a trader, gunrunner and, probably, slaver. Now James Ramsey Ullman (The White Tower) has come down...