After a devastating hail storm in 1995, insurance companies in and around Calgary funded a hail seeding program.
Meteorologists for a company called Weather Modification, based out of Didsbury, monitor storm cells likely to produce hail and dispatch aircraft to seed the clouds.
Cloud seeding is a way to reduce the size of the stone.
Hail is formed by water particles in a cloud being blown upwards to where it's cold.
They get heavy and fall back down.
Tom Walton of Weather Modification says, "So the essence is if you have a limited amount of ice particles, we add more. So the idea is to make more stones smaller sized and in an area of the cloud that's warmer than where it would naturally happen."
Yesterday two aircraft spent upwards of 7 hours in the air, and if those planes weren't working, the damage could have been much worse.
The cloud seeding project has been operating out of Didsbury for the last 15 years.
The season lasts from the beginning of June to the middle of September.
