rainmaking
any process of increasing the amount of precipitation discharged from a cloud. Primitive methods, such as rain dances or the throwing of pebbles into water, failed to produce rain, but modern techniques of seeding (cloud seeding) supercooled clouds—that is, those clouds containing liquid water droplets at temperatures below 0 °C (32 °F)—with frozen carbon dioxide or silver iodide offer some possibility of increasing rainfall amounts.