Saudi Arabia has taken steps to try and reduce the amount of desert areas it has with a futuristic-sounding cloud seeding programme. Cloud seeding attempts aim to improve a cloud’s ability to “produce rain or snow by introducing tiny ice nuclei into certain types of subfreezing clouds”, according to the US-based Desert Research Institute (DRI). A complicated process, this essentially means an aircraft can be used to drop small particles such as silver iodide, encouraging vapour to condense and