Bernard Vonnegut,Bernard Vonnegut, a physicist and one of two researchers who first figured out how to wring more raindrops from cloud cover for the croplands below, died on Friday at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany. He was 82 and lived in Albany.

The cause was cancer, said his brother, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the novelist.

Dr. Vonnegut was a distinguished professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany. Although he formally retired in 1985, he continued to work in his office at the university until earlier this year.

His expertise in meteorological phenomena ran the gamut from lighting bolts to tornadoes to updrafts and downdrafts in thunderstorms. He developed and explored theories about the role electrical charges play in the formation of precipitation as well as in tornadoes.

Dr. Vonnegut was working at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady when the technique of cloud seeding took flight in the 1940's. A colleague, Vincent J. Schaefer, discovered that a tiny grain of dry ice produced many millions of ice crystals when dropped into a cloud of water droplets below the freezing point.