Artificial rain experiment will be conducted in Maharashtra's arid Solapur district in the next two weeks under a Ministry of Earth Sciences project, an IITM official said on Thursday.

A special aeroplane will seed dark clouds with sodium chloride or calcium chloride as part of the experiment. To verify the actual rainfall precipitation, there have been 120 rain gauges deployed in the periphery of 200 kms around Solapur, an official of the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) said.