CLOUD PEDs

 The Next Time You’re Out West You Might See Clouds on Steroids (Daniel Modlin, Apr. 04, 2021, Daily Beast)

The idea of cloud seeding and weather modification has been around since 1940.

There were federally funded programs in the 1960s—one named Project Skywater that ultimately had mixed results. In the 1970s and 1980s, the US government began experimenting on how weather modification could be used as a war tool. But outside of ski resorts like Vail, where the technology is used to help increase snow during snowstorms, interest in cloud seeding largely dropped off.

Frank McDonaugh, the Associate Research Scientist of Atmospheric Science at the Desert Research Institute, argues this was likely an overselling of the efficacy of cloud seeding: “People were saying they could double the amount of precipitation, which just wasn’t true.”

However, over the last few years, there has been a surge in interest in geoengineering and weather modification as a tool to combat, or at the very least, mitigate the immediate effects of climate change. This experimentation is prevalent in eight states within the American Southwest, all of which are currently experiencing one of the driest periods ever recorded, and have never been more desperate for rainfall.

For Utah and Nevada, 2020 was the driest year on record, and for Colorado, it was among the driest, too. In fact, the past 20 years have been the driest and most arid span the region has experienced since at least the 1500s according to scientists, and has thus earned the current climate the title of “megadrought.”

As a result of such little precipitation and such extreme temperatures, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox declared a state of emergency last month, and for the first time ever, water officials in the Upper Colorado River Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah initiated a drought contingency plan.

The aforementioned plan is three pronged, comprising two reactive solutions: sending more water to smaller reservoirs; and paying farmers to voluntarily stop irrigating during dry years, and one proactive (or at least, it appears to be): increased cloud seeding.

“The idea behind cloud seeding,” Bart Geerts, Professor and Head of the Department of Atmospheric Science at the University of Wyoming, told The Daily Beast, “is to answer the question of whether or not you can make the hydrological cycle more efficient.”