For "exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services" during the war-namely, the application of long-range weather forecasting to the uses of battle, Krick was awarded the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Legion of Merit, and France's croix de guerre avec etoile de vermeille.

But apart from these kudos, the prophet classically found little honor in his home country, save from those who knew him best. These liked his idea for extending worldwide the benefits of longrange weather forecasting for the needs of peace, as it had been made to serve in war.

Krick wrote of his plan to his old friend. Dr. Robert A. Millikan at the California Institute of Technology, asking for a reinstatement of his credentials at the school and for an extension of the leave of absence which General Arnold had obtained for him at the outset of war.

Dr. Millikan responded with enthusiasm. "In view of your large experience in forecasting for the D-Day invasion and the other weather services connected with the AAF in the European theater and elsewhere," Millilkan wrote on June 5, 1945, "it would be useful for you before returning to the Institute to make contacts with the European meteorologists who, like yourself, are interested in the improvement of long-range weather forecasts, particularly in view of the fact that you inform me that you find that French, Russian and other European meteorologists have been approaching the long-range forecasting problem with techniques very similar to those which you yourself have developed."

Krick also wrote General Arnold about his plan. He pointed out that only private forecasters were able to provide an international weather service because public weather services had trouble operating outside their own countries.

Hearing more about the plan directly from Krick when the two met in Washington soon afterward, Arnold exclaimed, "I'll buy that!" He brought in Colonel Yates and General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, his assistant chief of staff, and had Krick tell them what he had in mind. Arnold instructed Yates to set up what was needed at the Washington end while Krick headed overseas, taking along several letters of introduction from Arnold to officials in South America, including the chief of staff of the Brazilian Air Force. Arnold liked the idea that when he turned the wartime Air Transport Command over to commercial operators, they would have access to Krick's long-range weather service around the world. He called Krick's plan "of tremendous importance to the United States." But Krick had failed to reckon with the United States Weather Bureau. At a meeting of the Provisional International Air Transport Association, the Weather Bureau was instrumental in getting a resolution passed which barred the airlines from using any part of their airmail subsidy to pay for private weather service. Bureau Chief Reichelderfer personally had the scheme killed in Brazil by writing to his counterpart in that country.

American carriers, in other words, would have to go on using the Weather Bureaus within the countries they served. They could not hire lrving Krick, here or anywhere else in the world.

Krick returned to CalTech to resume the work he had left for the war, bringing with him a group of British trainees from an international consultant service he had formed in England, sponsored by J. Arthur Rank, the film magnate. At CalTech, Krick planned to set up an international training center in the techniques of long-range forecasting. Then, in 1947, Dr. Millikan retired and was succeeded by Dr. Lee DuBridge, who for several years had been director of the radiation laboratory at MIT, Professor Rossby's former school.

One of Dr. DuBridge's first actions was to get rid of CalTech's meteorology department-and lrving Krick.

This all came as small surprise to Dr. Millikan, who had told Krick, "You'll never get anywhere with this fellow. My advice is to leave here. Take your staff with you. Find a way to carry on with your work of investigating atmospheric behavior, applying as you go what you find out-as we've always done."

Von Karman advised the same course. "With this new administration there's no future for you at CalTech."

Krick wanted to see another old friend. In his own little plane he and his new British bride, Marie, flew up to Sonora, California, and had a visit with General Arnold at the veteran soldier's ranch. As the pair walked in the garden, Arnold put his arm around Krick's shoulders and said, "Doc, I want you to continue your investigations because there'll come a time when somebody else will need what you've got. I'm not in Washington anymore, but they can still hear my bark. I'll see to it that you get support while you're getting on your feet."

Setting up for business in Pasadena, Krick and his group received a substantial contract from the Air Force and settled down to a resumption of their long-range forecasting service and studies - until General Arnold died. The contract with the Air Force was canceled next day.

In 1949, the Weather Bureau took steps to shoot down all private weather forecasters, a technique that promised to get Krick without making it appear they were especially aiming at him. The Bureau caused legislation to be introduced in Congress which would allow it to take over the specialized services of the private practitioners.

This action raised the hackles of the American Legion, which angrily accused the Weather Bureau of using "devious means and methods" to drive out of business these weather experts who at war's end had been urged to "carry on in the science of applied meteorology on a private, civilian basis, so that in the event of another emergency our country would have the vital ready reservoir of professionally competent and experienced meteorologists to man the defense - . ."

The Legionnaires recalled that, in response to protests from the private forecasters, the Bureau had promised to let up on them. The Bureau thereupon had adopted a "six-point program which was read into the Congressional Record, and which was subscribed to by the United States Weather Bureau as the policy to which they would honorably adhere thereafter in regard to these ex-GI private meteorologists."

At its annual convention in 1949 the Legion called on Congress to make a law out of the Weather Bureau's six-point program of behavior toward private weathermen. The Bureau forestalled this action by naming a "coordinator" to work with the private operators. No law was needed, it maintained.

At this time Krick was experimenting with something new, making the Weather Bureau unhappy with him all over again. This was artificial nucleation of the clouds to increase rain and snow. At Schenectady, New York, Dr. lrving Langmuir, Nobel laureate in chemistry in 1932 and director of General Electric's research laboratories, along with Vincent Schaefer, had discovered the principle of "cloud seeding," in July, 1946.

What they found had to do with a central secret of nature, that every raindrop and snowflake has a nucleus. These nuclei come from countless sources: the soil, vegetation, salt spray from the oceans, smokestacks, automobile exhaust pipes, aircraft emissions. Some particles form on their own by chemical reaction in the atmosphere. "Condensation, or ice, nuclei," weathermen call them because they attract water, just as surface objects under the right conditions attract dew.

When several million moisture molecules have collected like swarming bees on a speck of nuclei, they form a droplet, or ice crystal, depending upon the temperatures within the clouds where the process begins. When many million droplets come together, they make a raindrop or, in the case of ice crystals, a snowflake. If the cloud is "super-cooled" no ice crystals form, no matter how abundant the ice nuclei in nature, because of the peculiar behavior characteristics of those nuclei. Nothing may happen until the temperature of the cloud gets down to about five degrees above zero. At that point ice nuclei from certain soils may initiate the formation of ice crystals. The cloud-in summer usually a cumulus -mushrooms upward like an atomic explosion.

Inside the cloud, meanwhile, the ice crystals go on attracting moisture, growing rapidly larger. In ten to twenty minutes, as gravity takes over, the fatted ice crystals are on their way to earth as snowflakes, growing larger still as they encounter yet more droplets on the way down. They reach the ground as snow if the temperature is freezing or rain if it's above freezing.

Nature's work of building ice crystals into snowflakes improves as the cloud grows higher and colder. The process works best at about 13° below zero. But if there aren't enough bits of dust in the rising air, not much of anything happens: there's no rain, no snow. Without the "seeds," or ice nuclei, no ice crystals form, regardless of the temperature.

There is a point on the thermometer, however, at which the droplets give up and finally turn into ice crystals on their own, without the help of nuclei. This point is roughly 40° below zero.

And this "flashover" is unanimous. No droplets are left to make rain or snow-it's all ice, ornamenting the heavens with the graceful brush strokes and mare's-tails of high-flying cirrus clouds. So, clearly, nature's methods for getting the water back to earth, once the sun has pulled it up from the oceans and elsewhere, is not as efficient as it might be. Studies of thunderstorms in the eastern United States indicate that only about 5 percent of the water overhead ever makes it to the ground. In the dryer areas of the country, like the Great Plains, the clouds are usually so high up that what rain does start to earth sometimes disappears on the way. Scientists estimate that the "rivers" that flow by overhead carry six times as much water as those on the surface.

What Langmuir and his colleagues discovered was that these sky rivers can be made to yield more water by introducing artificial ice nuclei into the atmosphere. On these, snowflakes will form at much warmer temperatures than on those ice nuclei available in nature.

After much experimentation, it was found that the best seeding material was silver iodide, discovered by Bernard Vonnegut, likewise of GE's research staff. It was found to have nearly the same crystal structure as the ice crystal. Vaporized, silver iodide yields about 600,000 billion particles per gram-the amount you can put on your fingernail-each a potential snowflake or raindrop.

Besides being highly diffusive, with one gram filling several cubic miles of sky, silver iodide takes effect sooner than nature's own nuclei. It goes to work at around 25° down in the lower, more moist cloud layers rather than holding off until it is much colder. Since that is the temperature where most of the water is-sometimes three-quarters of the cloud-silver iodide clearly improves on nature's own seeds as a rainmaker.

This knowledge of how to woo the clouds for more rain came to light bit by bit as Krick joined the investigation and began experimenting with artificial nucleation during the winter of 1946-1947, a few months after Langmuir announced what he and Schaefer had learned at Schenectady.

Working with CalTech graduate students under his direction, Krick at first tried dry ice as the nucleating agent, heaving it into the clouds from an airplane. This was the material Langmuir had first used, silver iodide not being found to be useful until later.

Gradually Krick became convinced that this method of modifying the clouds was inherently faulty. For one thing, when it was good seeding weather it was often poor flying weather. Also, the seeding that could be done from an airplane was relatively local in scope, while nature's storm processes operated on a vastly greater scale. Krick turned his attention to finding a way to do the seeding from the ground. He developed a generator, or small furnace, which, after further research and experimentation with fuels and chemicals and trying it all out in assorted weather, released silver iodide crystals, or ice-forming nuclei, in what seemed to be the best size and number, into the rising currents typically present when the seeding time is right. Such a time occurs only when conditions are correct for nature's own rather inefficient rain process.

Using his ground generators, Krick went on experimenting for a couple more years, working in southern California and near Phoenix, Arizona. He then accepted an invitation to visit Langmuir, who had gone on with his own experiments, to compare notes and discuss the possibility of working together.

"I think it would be wise to plan for you to come to Schenectady and spend a day or two talking over the results that we have had," Langmuir wrote Krick on February 25, 1949. "Then we , . . might go to Arizona or Pasadena and look over and discuss the results that you have obtained. After that, we may find that it is desirable to make recommendations in regard to some joint operations." But other visitors had preceded Krick to Schenectady, and he was unprepared for Langmuir's greeting. "What is this with you and the Weather Bureau?" Langmuir asked curiously. "They came up here and just really emasculated you to me. They told me you were a nut-you're unscientific-don't know what you're doing, and so on and on."

Since Langmuir was working under GE contracts on a project for the Army, Navy and Air Force, he prudently found reasons to go on alone, without Krick. He advised Krick, however, to continue with his plans for commercial seeding operations.

By early 1950 Krick was ready to start putting his rainmaking knowledge and equipment to useful purpose on a wide scale. His action was in line with Dr. Millikan's philosophy, enunciated years before, that as learning was acquired in the classroom and laboratory, it should be applied in the field. Krick formed the Water Resources Development Corporation, with headquarters in Pasadena, and his first commercial customer was a wheat grower, Leo Horrigan, in the Horse Heaven area of eastern Washington. Horrigan was in danger of losing his crop from drought in June and came to Krick to see what might be done to save it.

The story of how it rained after Krick seeded the clouds over Horrigan's 100,000 acres and brought him a fine harvest that summer, while it stayed dry all around his land, traveled far and fast. It resulted in a phone call from Tom Dines, a banker in Denver, who knew of Krick's work during the war.

"I just found out that one of my directors is a big cattleman in New Mexico," Dines told Krick. "His name is Albert Mitchell. I suggested to him that maybe cloud-seeding would improve his rangelands so he could carry more cattle on them. I told him about you and what you're doing."

Albert Mitchell joined with some of his neighbors to hire Krick. A month after he completed his seeding program for Horrigan in Washington, Krick had a cloud-seeding project underway for Mitchell which continued intermittently for the next twenty-one years.

Krick extended his operations throughout the West during the growing drought of the early 1950s and moved to Denver, seeding the clouds not only to bring rain to crops, but to improve stream flows as well, including that of the Columbia River, chief source of power in the Pacific Northwest, where an approaching dry spell brought the threat of brownouts.

The Columbia River project grew out of Krick's earlier work with the Salt River Project in Arizona. Dick Searles, president of the Salt River Project, had become Secretary of the Interior under President Truman and one summer day in 1951 he phoned Krick at his Denver office.

"Go up to the Bonneville power administration and make a contract with them to seed the Columbia River basin," Searles directed. "Let's see if we can't get some more water in the river by fall." In a matter of weeks, with heavy rains in September during Krick's seeding operations, the Columbia River had risen to the point that the )ob was considered done. The Bureau of Reclamation, establishing a historical relationship between a gauging station on the Columbia in Montana and another on the Kootenay River in Canada, found that the flow of the Columbia had increased 83 percent above what might have been expected.

The Bureau of Reclamation came to this conclusion over the objections of Weather Bureau statisticians who took part in the evaluation and said that the finding was meaningless.

Krick soon was applying his cloud-seeding techniques to a larger area than anyone else being mentioned in the scientific journals of the time-more than 130 million acres-and was refining his methods as he proceeded. One project alone covered more than 30,000 square miles.

Wherever he appeared, invited by farmers, ranchers and water officials to tell them what he might be able to do to bring them rain, Krick found that he was not totally among strangers; his Weather Bureau "friends" were in the audience, alert to warn his hosts that there was nothing he could do to help them-that he was a faker.

"They followed me like fleas," Krick once remarked. When the farmers got together and formed what they called the National Weather Improvement Association, holding their first convention in Denver, with Krick as the featured speaker, they were soon aware of an uninvited guest in their midst. "Be careful about this fellow," warned the Weather Bureau's emissary as he circulated among them. "He doesn't know what he's doing. There's nothing to cloud seeding. The government doesn't believe in it or we would be doing it for you for nothing."

A single doubter in a group considering Krick's rainmaking services was often enough to make them scatter like quail and forget the whole thing.

As the Weather Bureau continued to dog his steps, his clients became fewer and fewer. About the only groups who stayed with him were those that included engineers-such as power companies and municipal water supply officials-who could assess things for themselves.

The Weather Bureau seemed never to let up on its determination to drive Krick out of business.

"I have received a clipping from the Denver Post . . . which contains a picture and description of a weather forecast display in the U. S. National Bank in Denver," wrote Bureau Chief Reichelderfer one day in 195l. Reichelderfer quoted the words under the offending photograph

Seven-day weather forecasts and past weather records for the current month are now available to customers of the United States National Bank in Denver. Here Yvonne Robertson of the bank's personnel department puts one of the forecasts in the bank's window. The display contains two forecasts, covering the eastern and western slopes, as an added service to ski fans and others in Denver who want to know western slope weather. The forecasts are prepared by Dr. lrving P. Krick, meteorological consultant.

"Of course, I would not question the propriety of furnishing forecasts from your Denver office to the bank," Reichelderfer went on, "but in this case it seems that unless the newspaper description is in error, the public display is not in accordance with the terms of the teletype license, paragraph 2, which provides that the licensee shall not use any of the reports or information for any purpose except that of providing a private consultant meteorological service of a specialized and individual nature."

Reichelderfer said he thought Krick would like to look into the matter and said he would appreciate knowing what he found out.

Mindful that the subject had been considered important enough to engage the personal attention of the top man in the Bureau Krick rose to the crisis without delay.

"This matter was reviewed by our legal department . . . and since the display does not in any way violate our agreement to refrain from publishing forecasts in newspapers or over the radio," he reported to Reichelderfer, "the opinion rendered to us indicated that the Bank was on sound ground since the material is for the benefit of their clients and not for the general public."

The Bureau was not mollified. Shortly there arrived a new communication, this one from 1. R. Tannehill, chief of the Synoptic Reports and Forecasts Division, who was acting during Reichelderfer's absence in Europe.

"It seems to me that publication in the meaning intended in the basic license, coupled with the phrase, 'or for any purpose except that of providing a private consultant meteorological service of a specialized and individual nature,' clearly excludes forms of publication in the broad sense, whether newspapers, radio, window display, or any other method which reaches the general public or any part thereof which does not in fact consist of clients of the licensee," Tannehill argued.

The passerby on the sidewalk, he went on, wasn't entitled to see the information in the window. "Removal of the display to the interior is a step in the right direction," he concluded. Krick patiently endured the Weather Bureau's bedevilments, but by the autumn of 195l it was time to draw the line-with the line being drawn by Krick's lawyer, T. R. Gillenwaters, who wrote Reichelderfer: "I have had called to my attention a clipping from the Scottsbluff, Nebraska Star Herald newspaper, in which your E. L. Van Tassel, the Scottsbluff weather observer, is quoted at length on other items than those that appear to me to be related to his duties as a weather observer and which directly affect our organization." Some of Van Tassel's remarks had made the ranchers feel that the Weather Bureau was meddling in their business-"when they might better be spending their time improving the weather service," Gillenwaters wrote.

"The statement that 'a generator can be built by a blacksmith for approximately $50,' and that 'the daily consumption of silver iodide is estimated at 10cents per machine day' is, of course, obviously intended to cast aspersions upon our organization, as we are engaged in a project for increasing rainfall in the area adjacent to Scottsbluff."

Gillenwaters said he had been getting the same kind of reports from Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Montana-reports of Weather Bureau men bad-mouthing not only Krick but anyone else doing cloud-seeding. If it kept up, he threatened to sue the Weather Bureau.

Reichelderfer in reply accused Gillenwaters of wanting to gag the Weather Bureau on the topic of rainmaking, saying such "an approach does not make it any easier to bring about the cooperation and constructive planning espoused by your letter." He said the position of the Bureau was that it didn't know if cloud-seeding worked or not, but was "very eager to get the facts," including any information the Krick organization might have.

In September, 1952, Krick gained moral support from a group of United States senators who had lost patience with the Weather Bureau for its negative approach to cloud-seeding. The senators were all from states in want of rain. At a joint hearing of three subcommittees on legislation to do something about the drought, they accused the Bureau of trying to prove that cloud-seeding was a failure instead of trying to develop a technique to help the farmers. They accused it of having a closed mind and of being against anyone with an idea that threatened change.

The senatorial storm hit when Willard F. McDonald, the bulky, gray-haired assistant chief of the Weather Bureau, started to justify the Bureau's conservatism. He was cut off by Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, chairman of the meeting, who roared, "You have consistently fought artificial rainmaking!"

McDonald replied defensively that, on the contrary, the Weather Bureau had conducted numerous experiments to produce rain, using both dry ice and silver iodide, but still wasn't ready to say that any rain that followed wouldn't have fallen anyhow. "The Bureau feels," said McDonald, "that it is still too early to try to define what can or cannot be done in this field and that a great deal more work is necessary before sound conclusions can be formed."

Senator Francis Case of South Dakota said that ranchers in his state had paid a professional rainmaker to seed clouds on twenty successive Fridays and that on twenty successive Saturdays it rained. "Are you not willing to concede that this proves the efficacy of cloud seeding?" Case demanded.

McDonald was not. "That," he retorted, "is like saying that if a bunch of women hang out their washings on Monday, and it rains Wednesday, the rain is caused by hanging out the washings," That at least left everybody laughing.

Krick persevered, and in late 1953 he signed the first of two contracts with Oklahoma City to seed the clouds for rain. By what followed, he won a sturdy partisan to his side in the person of Morrison B. Cunningham, superintendent and engineer of the Oklahoma City Water Department, who later became the city's director of public works.

"We had a contract with Dr. Krick last year which saved our life," Cunningham wrote to Robert S. Millar of the Denver Water Board, "and we got from 75 percent to 100 percent normal precipitation in the target area of our watershed, and it looks as if we would have received only ?0 percent without his help." In a similar optimistic vein, Cunningham wrote to a dozen or so other quarters where there might be interest in hearing about Krick-the Farm Journal, the Associated Press, county agents, city water departments, colleges, universities. . . . "During the term of Dr. Krick's contract, the river changed from a dry to a flowing stream," more than doubling the flow over the previous year, Cunningham wrote.

"We have more water in our reservoirs this year than for two years and the river valley is in the best condition to receive a flow of water with a minimum of losses than in the past two years. I am convinced that cloud-seeding, when conducted by experienced people like Dr. Krick's organization, we can assume is to be a new scientific approach to increasing precipitation."

But by this time, despite the missionary work of Morrison Cunningham, Krick was barely hanging on. The Weather Bureau had been reaching a far larger audience. He cut his staff from seventy to a handful and was wondering what to do next when he ran into a longrime friend, industrialist Floyd Odium, whose wife, Jackie Cochrane, always depended on Krick for weather forecasts before taking off on any of her flying exploits.

Odium wanted to make some investments in Spain, and it struck him that it might be interesting to convince the nation's dictator, Francisco Franco, to give him a concession to make rain in Spain. Krick thus became rainmaker for the Spanish government, seeding the clouds to bring down extra water for the Ministries of Air and Agriculture as well as for private power companies, which wanted more water in the rivers and reservoirs.

For Union Electrica Madrilena, Krick took the job on a contingency basis: that he be paid for each specified increment the river rose in a relation established between that river and some adjacent rainfall or river gauging stations. If there was no rise in the river, he would get no pay. After two years, the Spaniards were paying Odium so much money for Krick's work that they asked to change the deal to a flat-fee basis. The reservoir was up about 70 percent above expectancy, based on the formula developed by the client.

Then the French, hearing what the Yankee rainmaker was doing below the Pyrenees, became interested. After sending engineers from Electricite de France, headed by the President of the French Meteorological Society, to Spain to see firsthand what was going on, they engaged Krick to lay down rain and snow to raise the water level of an important reservoir high in the French Alps. The area was also a first-class ski resort, which could benefit from the project.

The French Meteorological Society reported the results. "For the first winter (1954-55), significant increase of 42.3 percent. For the second winter (1955-56), 78 percent; for each total year taken individually, 1954-55, 26.5 percent; 1955-56, 19 percent; for series of two consecutive years, 1954-56, 23.7 percent."

This showing, the society commented, was "doubtless due to the excellent natural location of the watershed and the competence of the operating company, which was Water Resources Development Corporation, of Denver, Colorado."

Whereupon Krick was elected an honorary member of the French Meteorological Society.

In New York, Mary Lasker, a friend of Floyd Odium and prominent in Hadassah, contracted with Krick to go to Israel for three years on a rainmaking mission there. "Can you grow wheat in the Negev?" Prime Minister Ben Gurion asked, referring to the desert near Beersheba.

"The rainfall characteristics there are similar to those in our eastern Washington-Oregon area and we're doing well there,' Krick answered, "Yes, I think we can grow wheat in the Negev."

A photograph taken in the Negev a year later by Krick showed his project director, Lewis 0. Grant, standing in wheat up to his chest.

In Italy the city of Genoa was building aqueducts to bring more water to the city's reservoirs which it wanted to be kept brimful while construction was in progress. They called on Krick. When he had accommodated the Genoese and returned home, former President Segne of Italy wrote to him, in effect, "Dams and reservoirs have been built in Sardinia under the Marshall Plan of your country. The reservoirs are supposed to be used to develop power and provide irrigation for agriculture, but they have no water in them. Will you come and bring us some rain to fill them?" Krick did, working from 1958 to 1961.

None of Krick's cloud-seeding successes overseas appeared to impress the U. S. Weather Bureau, however. It kept after him - wherever he might be. While he was in Israel, the head of the Bureau's research division, Dr. Harry Wexler, wrote to the chief of Israel's weather bureau seeking to discredit Krick - though wheat grew in the Negev and Israelis trained by Krick helped to carry on his cloud-seeding project after he left Wexler, while on duty with the U. S. Army Air Forces during the war, had scorned Krick's methods.

In time the Bureau of Reclamation joined with the Weather Bureau in tracking Krick. Repeatedly its representatives arrived on the scene, infecting controversy and confusion into a discussion as Krick negotiated a cloud-seeding contract - in Lebanon, South Africa, and elsewhere. This generally put an end to the proceedings.