How Industry Can Create Snow

Drop a 10-ton bag of flour from space onto the western Netherlands, and you’d get the scene that appeared in mid-January: an oblong patch of snow on an otherwise barren section of agricultural land. Was it an extremely local attempt at cloud seeding? Some fun-loving Dutch who’d frozen snow the winter prior, and decided to have a massive snowball fight?

The explanation did likely have a human, though unintentional, origin. The scene captured by a U.S. Geological Survey satellite on January 19 in Heensche Molen was probably the result of a rare weather phenomenon involving freezing temperatures and industrial activity—specifically, the “Wegener-Bergeron process,” according to NASA. The space agency talked with a local meteorologist, Wim van den Berg, who explained how that process works. Here’s the gist: