Weather control is the act of manipulating or altering certain aspects of the environment to produce desirable changes in weather. Some American Indians like some Europeans had rituals which they believed could induce rain. The Finnish people, on the other hand, were believed by others to be able to control weather.

As a result, Vikings refused to take Finns on their oceangoing raids. Remnants of this superstition lasted into the twentieth century, with some ship crews being reluctant to accept Finnish sailors. The early modern era saw people observe that during battles the firing of cannons and other firearms often initiated precipitation.

Magical and religious practices to control the weather are attested in a variety of cultures. In Greek mythology, Iphigenia was offered as a human sacrifice to appease the wrath of the goddess Artemis, who had becalmed the Achaean fleet at Aulis at the beginning of the Trojan War. In Homer's Odyssey, Aeolus, keeper of the winds, bestowed Odysseus and his crew with a gift of the four winds in a bag.

However, the sailors opened the bag while Odysseus slept, looking for booty, and as a result were blown off course by the resulting gale. In ancient Rome, the lapis manalis was a sacred stone kept outside the walls of Rome in a temple of Mars. When Rome suffered from drought, the stone was dragged into the city.

The Berwick witches of Scotland were found guilty of using black magic to summon storms to murder King James VI of Scotland by seeking to sink the ship upon which he travelled. Scandinavian witches allegedly claimed to sell the wind in bags or magically confined into wooden staves; they sold the bags to seamen who could release them when becalmed. In various towns of Navarre, prayers petitioned Saint Peter to grant rain in time of drought.

If the rain was not forthcoming, the statue of St Peter was removed from the church and tossed into a river. Perhaps the first example of practical weather control is the lightning rod. In the 1950s, computer scientist John von Neumann, an early theorizer on weather control, surmised that if Earth were to enter another Ice Age, a preventative solution would be to dump dirt (or spray soot from cropdusting planes) on the surface of the planet's glaciers.

He noted that this would significantly change their reflectivity (albedo), and thus increase the solar energy retained by the planet. Such a strategy would require repeated applications, as storms would cover some portion of the soot with new snow until their frequency and range abated. The theoretical efficacy of von Neumann's proposal remains to be examined.

Wilhelm Reich performed cloudbusting experiments in the 1950s to 1960s, the results of which are controversial and not widely accepted by mainstream science. Dr Walter Russell wrote of weather control in Atomic Suicide 1956. Jack Toyer in the 1970s built a rainmaker on Palmers Island near Grafton using a solar mirror, electromagnetic static charge, and infra red frequencies of light to induce weather in regional areas within Australia.

His work was continued by his successor, Peter Stevens. Cloud seeding is a common technique to enhance snowpack, and evidence on its effectiveness and safety is strong. Because of the public’s ever growing need for more water, there has also been a rapid development of water and hydropower utilities that devote resources to cloud seeding.

Critics generally contend that claimed successes occur in conditions which were going to rain anyway. It is used in a variety of drought-prone countries, including the United States, the People's Republic of China, India, and Russia. In the People's Republic of China there is a perceived dependency upon it in dry regions.

In the United States, dry ice or silver iodide may be injected into a cloud by aircraft, or from the ground. In mountainous areas of the United States such as the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada, it has been employed for several decades.

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