---
title: "Solveig Marchetti-Rand Randomised Her Own Rain Programme. The Result Closed It."
dek: "She insisted on sealed envelopes and a table of random numbers against her board's advice. Six seasons returned four per cent, with an interval from minus five to plus thirteen. She published all of it. Thirty-one people lost their jobs."
kind: obit (Obituary)
desk: The Sky Desk
author: Ray "Sunshine" Pell (fictional)
published: 2026-08-23T05:30:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/obit-solveig-marchetti-rand
tags: cloud seeding, randomisation, rain gauges, Montana, obituary
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# Solveig Marchetti-Rand Randomised Her Own Rain Programme. The Result Closed It.

*She insisted on sealed envelopes and a table of random numbers against her board's advice. Six seasons returned four per cent, with an interval from minus five to plus thirteen. She published all of it. Thirty-one people lost their jobs.*

Four per cent, with a confidence interval running from minus five to plus thirteen.

That is what six randomised winters of cloud seeding over the Rocky Mountain Front returned, and Solveig Marchetti-Rand printed it on the second page of her own programme's final report, over her own signature, in January 1989.

She had directed the programme for twenty-one years. The legislature struck its appropriation five months later. Thirty-one people lost their jobs on 30 June, and she countersigned every separation notice, including the last one, which was hers.

She died at home in Great Falls on 2 August, aged 91.

## The envelopes

In the autumn of 1982 she told her advisory board that the operational programme would from then on run as a randomised crossover. Every flight would seed or not seed according to a sealed envelope, and the envelopes were cut in the state statistician's office from a published table of random digits, in a room she was not allowed to enter.

The board voted five to two against. Her enabling statute gave the director operational discretion, and she used it.

The design fit on one sheet. The pilot carried the envelope on his knee-board and opened it after take-off, once the aircraft was in cloud and the day had already been judged seedable on the meteorology alone. Ridge generators ran to the same envelope. Forty-two gauges in the target basin and twenty-one in the control were read by staff never told which flights had been which.

She also signed an undertaking, still bound into the back of the report, not to look at any result until all six winters were flown. There were no interim looks.

## The number

One thousand and sixty-one flights reached the decision point between the winters of 1982–83 and 1987–88. Seventy-one were later excluded by her, for reasons below. That left 990 — 494 seeded, 496 not.

The seeded basins caught four per cent more precipitation. The interval ran from minus five to plus thirteen: the trial could not rule out that seeding had done nothing, and could not rule out that it had done rather a lot.

Set against the thirty-one randomised trials in our vault, [[PX-1986]], it is unremarkable — wide, centred a little above zero, indistinguishable from most of the field. That is the ordinary condition of the science. It was not the condition of a programme that had been telling farmers it worked since 1961.

## The seventy-one

In two winters the envelopes were got at. Delmar Ochoa-Tiedemann, who flew 388 of the sorties, says ground crew opened some at the morning briefing in 1984–85 and again in 1986–87 — "somebody wanted to know whether it was worth driving up to the generators in the dark."

She excluded those flights and listed them in Appendix C by date and tail number. Sixty-one were seeded flights, and on the raw gauge figures they were wetter than the ones she kept. Excluding them made her own result smaller, and nobody outside the programme would have known if she had not.

> **Figure:** What descended from the two things she wrote — see https://theyburied.com/article/obit-solveig-marchetti-rand

## The board chair's objection

Harlan Vosberg-Pace, who chaired the board and voted against, is 88 and has not changed his mind. His argument is not a stupid one and this newspaper will not pretend it is. Farmers in four counties paid a levy for a service. Randomising meant withholding that service on roughly half the good days, for six years, without telling them. "You can call it a trial," he said. "They bought rain."

She answered him in writing, in the two sentences that are the closest thing to a manifesto she left: that the levy bought a programme, not a promise, and that a service nobody has measured is a service nobody can price.

## Two pages about grass

From 1989 until 2011 she inspected rain-gauge exposure for a river-basin authority in the Missouri headwaters. Four hundred and ten gauges. Grass height, fence lines, the distance to the nearest cottonwood.

In her first autumn out of work she wrote a two-page siting standard for field staff, amended once, in 1996. We have found it copied into fourteen state manuals.

> I do not think it was killed. I think it was read.
>
> — Solveig Marchetti-Rand, in a survey box, 2004

## The eighty-eight words

She discussed the trial on the record exactly once. In 2004 a graduate student posted a questionnaire to nine hundred former weather-modification staff; two hundred and fourteen came back, and nobody has ever cited it.

Under "Anything else you would like us to know?" she wrote eighty-eight words. The last of them: "I would like it recorded that I have been inspecting gauges since 1989 and that the gauges are worse than the clouds."

## What this desk takes from it

The programme came back in 1993 without randomisation and has seeded every winter since — thirty-three seasons, currently $2.1m a year. No controlled trial has been attempted in the state in the thirty-eight years since her last randomised flight.

Her daughter's letter is below and is harder on us than on the legislature. We asked eleven questions about the winters and one about the gauges, which is the ratio her mother predicted.

The obituary she would have wanted is two pages long and concerns the siting of rain gauges. This is the other one.

## Sources (invented)

- Karin Marchetti-Rand Tessier, Daughter; hydrographer, Bozeman — Interviewed at her house twice, four hours in total, and sent the full draft with three weeks to answer (July and August 2026)
- Final report of the state precipitation-augmentation programme, 9 January 1989, 148 pages, including Appendix C, the excluded flights — Copied from the state archive for $38 and published entire with this story (May 2026)
- Harlan Vosberg-Pace, Chair of the programme's advisory board, 1979–1989; aged 88 — Interviewed by telephone twice, seventy minutes, recorded with permission (June 2026)
- Delmar Ochoa-Tiedemann, Programme pilot, 1981–1989 — Interviewed at his kitchen table in Lewistown; flew 388 of the randomised sorties (June 2026)
- A 2004 postal questionnaire to former weather-modification staff, Graduate survey, 900 circulated, 214 returned; never published — Located in a university archive; her free-text answer released under a consent form she signed permitting attribution by name (April 2026)

## Documents cited (invented)

- PX-1986: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1986

## What we could not confirm

- Why the appropriation was actually struck. The subcommittee record is four lines and names no reason. Five of the seven members are dead; of the two living, one does not recall the vote and one declined to speak to us. A former staffer says the report was the whole of it. We also hold a lobbying registration showing the incumbent contractor's agent in the building eleven times that spring, and we can connect it to nothing, and we are printing it here rather than in the body so that it cannot do work we have not earned.
- Whether seventy-one is all of the compromised flights. Ochoa-Tiedemann recalls early opening in two winters; the ground logs for 1984–85 were water-damaged in a 1997 basement flood and are partly unreadable. The exclusion list is her account of her own trial, which is the best evidence there is and is still her account of her own trial.
- The fourteen states. We counted field manuals that cite the standard by name. Two cite it without a date, one cites a version we could not find in any archive, and a rule printed in a manual is not the same thing as a gauge standing in a field with the grass cut around it.

## Right of reply

**Karin Marchetti-Rand Tessier, daughter** (Replied by letter on 18 August 2026, asking that it run entire. Printed unedited, including the parts about us.):

> You rang me about the trial. That is not a complaint. It is a data point, and it is the one my mother would have wanted you to have. Eleven of your questions were about the six seasons and one was about the gauges. I counted, because she taught me to count things like that at the table.
> 
> I want to be fair, because you were careful with her. You sent me the draft. You sent me the report you bought from the archive, which I had not held since I was seventeen, and you let me find Appendix C on my own instead of telling me what was in it. Appendix C is the list of flights she threw out. Sixty-one of the seventy-one were seeded flights and they were the wet ones. Throwing them out made her own number smaller. Nobody made her do that. Nobody would have known.
> 
> So here is what I think, and some of it is against you.
> 
> You have written the closure as though it were her doing, and there is a flattery in that she would not have accepted. She did not close the programme. Seven people in a committee room closed it, having been handed a number and having read it correctly, which is what you want people in committee rooms to do. Four years later a different set of people opened it again without the number, and it has run for thirty-three seasons since, and no one has lost a job over that. If there is a scandal in this story it is not in 1989. It is in the thirty-three years afterwards, when it was cheaper to seed than to find out.
> 
> On the thirty-one. She wrote to every one of them. I have the carbons in a shoebox and they are not good letters, they are stiff and they are too short, and she rewrote some of them four times. She knew what a generator operator earned in a season and what losing it meant to a household in Cascade County. She never once said in my hearing that it had been worth it. She said the trial had been necessary. Those are two different sentences and she was exact about the difference for thirty-seven years.
> 
> On the standard, you will want to call it the modest second act, and it is not. A rain gauge under a cottonwood reads low for forty years and every dataset downstream inherits the error and nobody ever audits a gauge, because auditing gauges is not a career. She inspected four hundred and ten of them. She wrote two pages. Those two pages are the reason some quantity of the record in this country is less wrong than it was, and nobody will ever be able to say by how much, which is precisely the sort of good she preferred: the kind you cannot take credit for and cannot be photographed doing.
> 
> She told me in the kitchen that the standard was the more useful of the two things and that people would only ever ask about the other one. She said it flatly, without any bitterness at all. She was right about the ratio. You have proved it again this month, and you have printed the proof in your own diagram, which I will give you credit for.
> 
> One correction. You have her declining to campaign and you let it sound like principle. She was asked in 1991 by a group that wanted to use her and she said no in a letter I still have, and her reason was not principle. Her reason was that she thought she would lose, and that losing in public would make the result easier for the next person to wave away. That is a tactical judgement, not a noble one, and she would want it printed as what it was.
> 
> And since you have gone to the trouble, print the title properly. It is 'Exposure and Siting of Standard Rain Gauges: A Two-Page Standard for Field Staff'. She put the length in the subtitle so that nobody could claim it was too long to read.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.