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56,600 minutes in 1997 despite the fact that the total amount of both the silver iodide and dry ice dispensed in 1998 were 22% and 10% lower, respectively. Despite the increased amount of seeding time, the number of seeding flights and the total flight hours of those flights were fewer in number in 1998. There were 598 seeding flights for 1,370 hours flight time in 1998 compared to 651 flights and 1,953 seeding flight hours in 1997. These differences turn out to be 8% fewer seeding flights and 30% fewer hours flown in 1998 than in 1997. All other categories of flight similarly decreased, such as observation flights and "other" flights which included maintenance, ferry flights and flights to travel to other airports to standby for possible operations. In 1997 we noted the program's apparent good fortune to have such few days in which extensive hail damage was common to both the northern and southern target areas on the same day. Since we couldn't adequately explain the unusual pattern, we were curious to see whether the pattern repeated itself this year. Hail-day research was done by our meteorological assistant, Kyle Winright. He found that when damaging hail f~ll in the northern target area, it would also fall in the southern target area about 41% ofthenme. Looking at it another way, 59% of the time no hail would occur in the southern target area. Also, the average number of hail-days common to both areas was 34 days per season. This year there were o!1ly 15 days in which hail was common to both target areas, an exceptional departure from the historic normal, down from 37 days in 1997. We would like to take full credit for this, but we can't. We think there were unusual weather patterns at work this season which helped create this anomaly, although cloud seeding is very likely to have had a major impact as well. In the next section hail distribution will be examined more closely. Another observation of the historic data examined showed that most of the time the days with hail damage common to both targets were generally not extensively damaging in both areas on the same day, only one of the areas was usually hit hard. To be sure, there were days in which considerable damage to both areas did occur, however, they were the exception, not the general rule. However, more work needs to be done in this department to see whether or not seeding effects may be . . suggested. 1998 turned out to have just two days in which hail damage of some significance occurred common to both areas: May 23rd and May 24th. As a brief aside on hail damage, the northern target area sustained only 45% of the number of hail claims that it had in 1997, and 1997 was one of the lowest years for crop-hail damage in many years in that region. So, NW Kansas appears to have had a super year as far as having less crop-hail damage is concerned. 22