More recently, the U.S. government project Stormfury attempted for decades to lessen the force of hurricanes by seeding them with silver iodide.

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These pellets, usually made of silver iodide, salts or calcium chloride, are physically dropped via plane or shot into the air via rockets.

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These offices, set up over the past 15 years, deploy artillery, rocket-launchers and aeroplanes to seed clouds with chemicals (usually silver iodide) that encourage droplets to form and fall where needed, or prevent the formation of destructive hailstones.

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Instead of using aircraft-borne chemicals as seeds, the researchers propose spraying seawater from unmanned, wind-powered, satellite-controlled vessels that would cruise the latitudes where hurricanes form since droplets of brine have a similar effect to dry ice and silver iodide.

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In China, they use artillery shells, rockets and airplanes to spray existing cloud systems with silver iodide, a compound that triggers moisture in the clouds to form ice crystals, which then fall to earth as snow or rain.

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