We really can control the weather - but it may not be very useful.

By Michael Marshall
24 February 2020.
Cloud seeding works – sort of. New experiments offer the strongest evidence to date that
spraying clouds with powder can cause more snow to fall. However, the problem is making it work
in practice. Not every cloud can be seeded and we don’t know why. It also isn’t clear when it would
be cost effective. Cloud seeding has existed as a technology since the 1940s, says Sarah Tessendorf
of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. In theory, it should make
more rain or snow. The idea is to spray a powder, normally silver iodide, into clouds. Each particle
acts as a seed for an ice crystal, which grows around it and then falls as precipitation. However,
despite decades of research it has been difficult to show that cloud seeding works. Experimenters
have compared what happens to clouds that are seeded with those that aren’t, but it hasn’t been
possible to get a large enough sample size to control for natural changes. “The weather’s very
variable, it changes all the time, and it’s very complicated,” says Tessendorf.
That has now changed, thanks to a project called SNOWIE (Seeded Natural and Orographic
Wintertime clouds – the Idaho Experiment). In 20 days in January 2017, Tessendorf and her
colleagues seeded orographic clouds, which form when air is forced up over mountains. They
sprayed silver iodide from an aeroplane, which flew in a zigzag to create a distinctive pattern in the
sky. The team used radar to look for this pattern in the clouds, placing mobile radars on mountain
ridges to scan for snowfall in places where normal weather radar couldn’t reach. On three days, the
team found clear evidence of snowfall from clouds that had been seeded. On the ground, this
amounted to a light dusting, between 0.05 and 0.3 millimetres deep. Crucially, the team has
estimated the total volume of water produced from this. The most successful experiment, on 31
January, released snow equivalent to 340,000 cubic metres of water from the clouds after 24
minutes of cloud seeding. The least successful day was 19 January, when snow equivalent to
123,000 m3 of water was produced by 20 minutes of cloud seeding. In total, the three successful
days produced about 282 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, the team say.
“We have now scientific evidence that seeding of orographic clouds can increase
precipitation,” says Andrea Flossmann at the University of Clermont Auvergne in Clermont-
Ferrand, France. “The increase is, however, below 10 per cent.” Tessendorf agrees there are still
significant challenges. “We collected data in over 20 cases,” she says. But they could only
demonstrate the effect on three days when there was no natural precipitation. “In cases where
there’s background precipitation forming, it’s much more complicated.” She says new computer
models of cloud seeding may allow them to see the effect. Worse still, clouds vary. “The same
cloud over the same watershed might have some areas of it that are seed-able and others that might
not be,” says Tessendorf. In particular, seeding only works when water is “supercooled”, meaning it
is still liquid at temperatures below 0°C. All this suggests that cloud seeding may not be cost-
effective. “Water managers would be much better off looking at alternatives,” says Paul Sayers of
water management consultants Sayers and Partners in the UK. For example, farmers can shift to
less wasteful forms of irrigation, he says.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2234991-we-really-can-control-the-weather-but-it-may-not-
be-very-useful/
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