Cloud Seeding and Chemistry

Strangely enough, it rained, big fat drops straight down, a little while ago.  Now the sun is shining and the day is whispering off to the west, perhaps chuckling to itself; it pulled off a surprise cloudburst and got away with it. 

Certainly, we could use a lot more precipitation than a quick wetting down like we had today.  It makes me wonder if there are still cloud seeders flying around up in the upper stratosphere somewhere, tossing chemicals out of their windows to make the clouds let go of any moisture they hold.  You used to hear about that in the news. Chemistry learned in theory applied in real-time to aid humanity. 

I have dim memories of a chemistry class in which my ever-patient instructor tried to light the ah-hah bulbs over our heads.  We did try, Mr. Kennedy, to "get it," but I needed a seeder to fly around my head and coalesce fleeting and vaguely understood concepts into something permanently understood.  Orbitals, bases, acids, Bohr's theorem (I think), potential energy.  I think cloud seeding as an idea had to have been conceived by someone who sopped up chemistry concepts like my synthetic chamois dishcloth soaks up spilled coffee.  They just think, squeezing the old brain a bit, and an application like cloud seeding pours out.  My mind in relation to chemistry is rather different:  I soak up the lesson and it evaporates.  Sigh.  Mind as hot pavement.  Pffffft! 

I am not grousing about my lack of chemistry brain power; I am just curious if the cloud seeding is still being attempted.  I am a bit fuzzy on the specifics, but I am open to the possibility.  I do worry - if I mull the big picture over for a minute or two - that the moisture squeezed from the clouds, in spite of their efforts to get on south or east or wherever before they are molested by a seeder, was, in a way, robbed from the clouds' intended destination south or east or wherever.  I imagine clouds are formed with an assignment:  Go rain on Merced for 22 minutes at 4 PM Wednesday, or something like that.  So, if we send up a chemist in a biplane who tosses his chemicals out of his window into the clouds (I'm picturing a grinning aviator with a leather helmet and big goggles, a scarf flying rakishly behind him) and the clouds prematurely dump their load on the land below, there will be a further drought south or east or wherever.  Clouds, being like baggies of moisture up there, only carry so much moisture around before they are emptied.  I guess you can tell I never took a meteorology class.  That, and logic, were on my list of Classes To Take Sometime.  I may yet get to them, but until then, I'll struggle on with what I remember from Mr. Kennedy's chemistry class way back when. 

So, okay, what did you say about oxygen and hydrogen?