Cloud seeding

Cloud seeding has been studied for many decades as a weather modification procedure (for an interesting study of this subject, see the article in Technometrics by Simpson, Alsen, and Eden, “A Bayesian Analysis of a Multiplicative Treatment Effect in Weather Modification”,). The rainfall in acre-feet from 20 clouds that were selected at random and seeded with silver nitrate follows: 18.0, 30.7, 19.8, 27.1, 22.3, 18.8, 31.8, 23.4, 21.2, 27.9, 31.9, 27.1, 25.0, 24.7, 26.9, 21.8, 29.2, 34.8, 26.7, and 31.6.

(a) Can you support a claim that mean rainfall from seeded clouds exceeds 25 acre-feet? Use α = 0.01.

(b) Is there evidence that rainfall is normally distributed?

(c) Compute the power of the test if the true mean rainfall is 27 acre-feet.

(d) What sample size would be required to detect a true mean rainfall of 27.5 acre-feet if we wanted the power of the test to be at least 0.9?

(e) Explain how the question in part (a) could be answered by constructing a one-sided confidence bound on the mean diameter.