Cloud-bursting service guarantees sunny wedding weather

http://www.cnet.com/news/150000-cloud-bursting-service-guarantees-sunny-wedding-weather/

Weddings can be expensive and fraught with stress as brides and grooms fret over every last detail, from the color of the cake icing to how to handle the weather if it decides to rain all over them and their 250 guests on the lawn of a dream chateau in the country. Oliver's Travels, a luxury holiday rental company, is offering to play weather god...for a price.

For now only available in France, Oliver's Travel's cloud-bursting service sends out aircraft to trigger rain ahead of your wedding, hopefully leaving your special day clear of the wet stuff. The company says the package "can 100 percent guarantee fair weather and clear skies for your wedding day." The service requires three weeks of planning involving meteorologists and pilots skilled with using silver iodide to seed the clouds to prompt the rain.

This type of cloud-bursting works by spreading silver iodide in clouds, causing moisture to condense around it, creating rain and encouraging the clouds to disperse.

The cloud-bursting wedding guarantee only goes so far. Oliver's Travels notes that it can't do anything about major weather phenomenons like hurricanes. The service also has to take place 30 miles away from any domestic airports so that the cloud-seeding planes can operate at the correct altitude and not disrupt other air traffic.

Hiring meteorologists, pilots and planes doesn't come cheap. The service starts at £100,000, which is about $150,000 or AU$200,000. At that price, the cloud-bursting is really more of a fun PR stunt than a practical addition to a typical wedding package. That might not stop some deep-pocketed people from throwing their money into the clouds in pursuit of fairytale wedding-day weather.