Airborne Bacteria Make It Rain, MSU Researcher, David Sands Finds

The sky is not an ethereal, sterile realm. It’s teeming with bacteria, and scientists say that the microbes play a powerful role in producing rain and snow.

While the idea that bacteria could prompt precipitation was previously known, a paper published this week in Science shows that they’re more important than anyone expected.

The fact that bacteria could cause snow and rain was discovered almost by accident in the 1970s by study co-author David Sands http://plantsciences.montana.edu/facultyorstaff/faculty/sands/sands.html , a Montana State University http://www.montana.edu/ plant pathologist, during his research on Pseudomonas syringae, a microbe that causes ice to form on leaves.

Unable to discover the source of repeatedly infected fields, Sands exasperatedly took to the skies. He did the scientific equivalent of dragging a cup through the clouds — and lo and behold, there was P. syringae.

By Brandon Keim

Full Story: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/02/bacteria_clouds