Barbara Fornadel, Age 11, Of Elizabeth, N.J.., for her question:

Can rain be created artificially?

The Hopi Indians dance a frerizy to coax rain from the desert skies. Our up to date weathermen use more scientific methods to make the clouds release their moisture. The misty moisture of a cloud is made of droplets too fine to fall. It jells into sizable raindrops around a solid nuclei of dust and other floating debris. Our rainmakers spray dry ice or silver iodine into a likely cloud to act as raindrop nuclei.

This cloud seeding is new and successful only to a point. It cannot produce rain from a clear sky or from a fair weather cloud. It may cause a likely cloud to

Rain sooner, and it often coaxes more moisture to fall from a rainy cloud. But cloud seeding cannot douse rain over a large area, and we do not know why it seems to fail more often than it succeeds.