Lakin ? On a stormy afternoon, Walter Geiger sat in front of his two computer monitors at the Kearny County Airport with a radio in his hand. He guided three single-engine planes to severe parts of storms around Garden City, Ulysses, Scott City and Tribune as part of the Western Kansas Weather Modification Program.

The program, which has been in existence for 34 years, operates from April until September. The program has two main objectives, said Geiger, a meteorologist and program manager: to reduce the size of hail in storms and to increase rainfall by seeding selected clouds in the absence of severe weather.

Grieger and the pilots use a seeding agent called silver iodide to reduce the size of hail.

“We’re trying to protect as much cropland as we can,” Geiger said.

The program has a budget of $550,000 and is funded by the state and participating counties: Greeley, Wichita, Gray, Scott, Lane, Hamilton, Kearny, Finney and Haskell. The counties pay the weather modification program 5.2 cents per acre of cropland and 2.2 cents per acre of rangeland. The program has planes based in Lakin, Syracuse, Scott City and Leoti.

Geiger said for every dollar spent on the program, there’s a benefit of $10 to $35 in the form of better crop yields.

Geiger, monitoring the radars from the airport north of Lakin, and the pilots were focused one rainy day on reducing the size of hail stones in the storms.

Kyle Spencer, a resident of Scott County and a pilot with the weather modification program, flies a plane that is different from the three single-engine planes. The Piper Cheyenne II that he flies is a cloud top aircraft, which means Spencer is the only pilot that flies into the clouds.

The three single-engine planes fly below the clouds and use updrafts, the air that flows into a cloud from the ground, to release the seeding agent.