Quadrillions of space meteors that struck Earth's atmosphere in November 1966 produced an 11 percent increase in worldwide precipitation one month later. A similar meteor storm is expected to be seen from 1 a.m. EST until dawn of Nov. 17 and 18 this year (or in mid-November 1999), and it also may trigger excessive worldwide precipitation in December.

Ordinary meteors are millions of high-velocity dust-size rock and metal space particles that plunge through the upper atmosphere's Ionosphere every day. They create white streaks for an instant via frictional heat until they slow and cool enough for the light to go out at 50 miles altitude. Meteors originate in the Asteroid Belt, located 167 million miles away between Mars' and Jupiter's orbits. A viewer may observe roughly six per hour from any clear night location on Earth (more after midnight and less before).

Meteor showers are tens of millions of dust-size ice, rock and metal particles that come from comet tails once a year as the Earth passes through a comet's orbit. This contains innumerable, invisible, attenuated tail particles that were "blown" away from the comet by the solar "wind" and distributed throughout its elliptical orbit. About 14 comet orbits are encountered annually by Earth to give us 14 meteor showers annually. An average individual meteor shower count from any clear-night location ranges from about 10 to 1,000 streaks per hour (again, more after midnight).

Meteor storms are periodic, extra-heavy meteor showers with individual streak counts from a single location ranging roughly from 1,000 to 150,000 per hour; which may light up the night sky enough to cast shadows and to outshine the full moon. This happens when large groups of invisible particles orbit in tandem with (but not necessarily near) the comet and pass through Earth's orbit. The most impressive meteor storm and shower displays are the Leonids, those associated with Comet Temple-Tuttle, which has a 33-year orbital period. Leonid meteor showers or meteor storms have been recorded in mid-November roughly every 33 years since 902 AD.

The three largest Leonid meteor storms occurred in 1799, 1833 and 1966, with hourly streak counts at individual locations as high as 30,000; 140,000 and 150,000 respectively. The 1833 Great Leonid Storm enabled scientists to discover the connection among visible comets, tails, meteor showers and meteor storms. The 1966 Great Leonid Meteor Storm, the most spectacular one in history, led to the proof of a theory on how meteors observed 50-100 miles up within the Ionosphere can influence rain and snowfall from clouds only one mile up within the Troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere where terrestrial life abounds.

In 1953, an Australian scientist, E.G. Bowen, published a theory that cold invisible meteor particles took approximately one month to drift 50 miles down from the Ionosphere to the Troposphere cloud levesls, where they acted as condensation nuclei to augment global precipitation. His theory was based on enhanced rain having occurred about 30 days after three meteor showers had taken place in two locations: Australia and England. Bowen subsequently abandoned his theory after being castigated by prestigious scientists for having used too few weather stations for proposing such an important theory.

Bowen's theory intrigued me, so I decided to test it after the 1966 Leonid Meteor Storm. This resulted in a 1969 publication with four high school student co-authors that proved the validity of the Bowen Theory. Using 953 worldwide weather stations that had records going back at least 30 years, we found an 11 percent increase in December 1966 global precipitation (one month after the November 1966 Great Leonid Meteor Storm) compared with the previous 30-year December average for those same weather stations). Now, I hope to work with other students to check the Leonids' effect on world precipitation once again.