ABSTRACT
The scientific study of weather modification began with Vincent Schaefer's discovery that pellets of dry ice would nucleate ice crystals in supercooled clouds. Lognormal distributions have been used extensively in atmospheric sciences to describe phenomena that take on non-negative values, such as storm, daily, and longer-period rain, snow, and hail amounts, particle size distributions, pollutant concentrations, cloud dimensions, air velocity fluctuations, flood frequencies, and radio wave amplitude fluctuations. J. Aitchison and J. A. C. Brown summarize the early history of application of lognormal distributions to particle sizes, such as produced naturally in sediments or mechanically by grinding. Hydrology is a large-scale user of statistical methods, including estimating and modeling with lognormal distributions, particularly to predict precipitation, flood frequencies, water supply, and flow through porous media. The lognormal has been used to fit the distribution of the variable "irradiance" resulting when electromagnetic waves are propagated through a turbulent medium.
