Can cloud seeding save us from water chapter?

On a chilly, windy night time in November 2025, a quadcopter drone took off from a farm area on the foot of the Bannock mountain vary north of Salt Lake Metropolis, rising 4000 metres into thick clouds. A fan with anti-icing propellers kicked into motion, blowing yellow mud out of a cannister hooked up to the again of the drone. Cloud-seeding firm Rainmaker was making an attempt to struggle mud with mud, spreading silver iodide powder to encourage precipitation and finish the lethal mud storms plaguing Utah’s capital.

The Nice Salt Lake, which is fed by snowmelt from the Bannock mountains and close by ranges, has roughly halved in space since 2012. Wind blows poisonous mud from the dried lakebed in direction of Salt Lake Metropolis, exposing thousands and thousands of individuals to “without end chemical substances” and heavy metals like arsenic. However cloud seeding “can refill the lake”, Rainmaker, which is contracted by the state, has promised on billboards.

Drought within the south-west US is symptomatic of an period of worldwide water chapter, with over 50 international locations now collectively investing tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in cloud-seeding expertise. But the jury continues to be out on whether or not rainfall might be engineered in any significant approach. “What we don’t find out about cloud seeding is how efficient it’s,” says Kaveh Madani on the UN College Institute for Water, Atmosphere and Well being. “However while you’re determined, it sounds excellent.”

These realities might matter lower than perceptions. The notion that humanity can management the climate is fuelling cross-border claims of water theft and spurring conspiracy theories about lethal flash floods. So, will cloud seeding replenish freshwater reserves, or merely distract from taking local weather motion?

Controlling clouds

We now have dreamed of mastering the climate since historic instances, when, based on Greek mythology, Phaethon, the mortal son of the solar god Helios, took the reins of the solar chariot from his father. Through the Nineteen Thirties Mud Bowl, when extreme mud storms raged throughout the American Nice Plains, so-called pluviculturists – also called rain wizards – promised to interrupt droughts with vats of vaporous chemical substances. However even when rain did come, a query at all times lingered: was it because of the rainmaking, or only a change within the climate?

An unintentional discovery in 1946 revealed a possible scientific foundation for rainmaking. Vincent Schaefer, a researcher at Normal Electrical’s Home of Magic laboratory in upstate New York, tried to chill down a freezer on a sizzling July day by dropping dry ice into it. To his shock, the freezer crammed with floating ice crystals because the blast of intense chilly froze tiny water droplets suspended within the air. These supercooled droplets can stay liquid at temperatures as little as -35°C (-31°F).

Since many clouds comprise supercooled droplets, the Normal Electrical analysis workforce started dumping dry ice from aeroplanes. As water would condense onto the newly frozen droplets, they might acquire mass and start to descend, colliding with nonetheless extra droplets. Finally, they might get heavy sufficient to fall out of the cloud and attain the bottom as snow, or soften into rain on the way in which down.

That very same yr, Schaefer’s colleague Bernard Vonnegut found that silver iodide particles, which have a hexagonal construction that’s just like ice, might function seed crystals to “idiot” droplets into “explosive ice progress” at hotter temperatures than dry ice, he wrote in his lab notes. The discovering partly impressed Vonnegut’s brother Kurt to write down his 1963 science-fiction novel Cat’s Cradle, by which the world is threatened by a substance referred to as “ice-nine” that may freeze water on contact.

Seeing the battlefield potential of what the Normal Electrical workforce described as “the management of climate”, the US navy took over their analysis. The next yr, the scientists tried to redirect a hurricane by bombing it with dry ice. Sadly, the storm, which had handed over Florida and was heading out to sea, rotated and slammed into the coast a second time – though it’s unclear whether or not they bore any duty.

Different international locations, together with China and the Soviet Union, began their very own cloud-seeding programmes, with little accountability. “He who controls the climate will management the world,” soon-to-be US President Lyndon Johnson stated in 1962.

However the publicity of the key US cloud-seeding operation to bathroom down North Vietnamese navy provides on the Ho Chi Minh Path brought on public outrage and soured opinions in Congress. In 1977, the US and the USSR spearheaded a global ban on environmental modification for navy functions, and analysis funding started to say no. In the end, the US authorities deserted cloud seeding as a result of there was no convincing scientific proof that it really labored.

Water chapter

In more moderen years, rising drought and shrinking rivers and aquifers have sparked a cloud-seeding renaissance. Resulting from world warming, urbanisation and agriculture, most areas are overdrawing their annual revenue of rainwater and snowmelt and starting to run down their long-term financial savings of groundwater. 4 billion individuals – virtually half the individuals on Earth – face water shortages no less than one month a yr.

“We’re seeing desertification, sand and dirt storms. We’re seeing declining groundwater tables. We’re seeing sinkholes. We’re seeing land subsidence. We’re seeing shrinking lakes, rivers,” says Madani.

Consequently, weather-modification programmes have popped up on each continent besides Antarctica. In Iran, the place dried-up reservoirs and sputtering faucets helped gasoline protests final yr, each the civilian authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard have begun plane cloud-seeding campaigns in an try to interrupt the five-year drought. International locations together with India, Thailand and Saudi Arabia now conduct large-scale cloud seeding.

In these sizzling, dry areas, water droplets in clouds are sometimes too heat to freeze on contact with silver iodide, so scientists disperse salt particles, which take in moisture from the air, basically constructing raindrops round themselves. Because the downward pull of gravity overcomes the uplift of air currents, they start to descend, bumping into and accumulating smaller droplets till they fall out as rain.

Small plane within the United Arab Emirates, which faces excessive water stress, fly tons of of missions with salt flares below their wings annually. The nation has additionally spent tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} on analysis. “Operational [cloud seeding] might not at all times work or work very nicely, however water is an emotional sort of factor for those who don’t have a number of it,” says radar skilled Roelof Bruintjes, who consulted the UAE programme.

China, the place water insecurity threatens greater than 50 million individuals, has the world’s largest programme. It resembles not a lot an experiment with cloud formations as a full-scale assault on them. Moreover rockets and planes, it has deployed hundreds of anti-aircraft weapons and cannons to fireplace salt and silver iodide into the sky to attempt to enhance irrigation and hydropower, rinse air pollution from the air, stop hailstorms and regrow melting glaciers. China claims its cloud-seeding operations lengthen over 5 million sq. kilometres, overlaying greater than half of the nation.

Since 2016, China has even been making an attempt to divert water from the Indian monsoon to the cities and farms of the Yellow River basin, hundreds of kilometres to the east. For this so-called Sky River venture, it has put in tons of of “burning chambers”, basically remote-controlled chimneys that combust silver iodide, to intercept atmospheric rivers and precipitate their moisture into the headwaters of the basin.

To what extent do these bold cloud-seeding initiatives really repay? “What most individuals wish to know once they ask that query is: are you able to produce sufficient precipitation… to have some influence in direction of the mitigation of drought?” says Jeffrey French on the College of Wyoming. “That’s a way more troublesome query to reply.”

A wide range of trials have claimed to extend precipitation by as a lot as 20 per cent. However as a result of no two clouds are the identical, there’s no management to find out whether or not precipitation is because of cloud seeding or pure variability. To get round that, researchers in Wyoming burned tanks of silver iodide on the bottom beneath clouds passing over one mountain vary, whereas leaving a close-by vary untouched for comparability. They randomly chosen which of the 2 ranges to seed and operated from 2007 to 2014 to attempt to account for annual fluctuations in snow. Underwhelmingly, precipitation elevated by 1.5 per cent, which is statistically insignificant.

It was solely in 2017 that French and his colleagues grew to become the primary to point out no doubt that cloud seeding can produce precipitation. The SNOWIE experiment dropped silver iodide flares from an plane on clouds over the Sawtooth mountains in Idaho. The plane intentionally flew north and south, perpendicular to the wind, in order that the slowly falling flares shaped a zigzag sample as they had been carried eastward by gusts.

About half-hour later, among the many snow banks and pine bushes, truck-mounted radar methods noticed ice crystals forming in an analogous sample. “It pops up very a lot on this kind of zigzag style. And that’s simply not one thing that naturally would ever occur,” says French. “Is it doable to change the pure evolution of a cloud? I’d say, definitively sure. We confirmed that.”

Though cloud seeding can generate precipitation, the quantity varies massively relying on the placement, the season and atmospheric circumstances, says Katja Friedrich on the College of Colorado Boulder, who led the SNOWIE examine. Some clouds merely don’t comprise sufficient moisture to supply rain.

But cloud-seeding claims have led many to suspect that governments are taking part in God with water flows on a large scale. If China is redistributing water to the extent that it claims to be – or if different international locations suspect that it’s – it might spark battle, suggests James Fleming at Colby Faculty in Maine, creator of Fixing the Sky. Such far-reaching plans verge on the form of world interventions in opposition to local weather change referred to as geoengineering, like spraying tiny seawater droplets into clouds so they are going to replicate extra daylight away from the ocean. In India, officers have publicly claimed that China’s climate modification brought on floods in states downriver of Tibet. In an analogous vein, Iran has accused Israel and Turkey of “cloud stealing” precipitation that was on the way in which to Iran.

It may appear intuitive that if extra rain falls on one place, much less will fall on different locations downwind. Rainfall isn’t a zero-sum sport, nonetheless. Clouds typically precipitate solely a small share of their moisture, or they rain over the ocean. If something, cloud seeding quickens the pure water cycle, says Friedrich.

Conspiracy theories

Nonetheless, a 1996 US Air Drive report on “proudly owning the climate”, with methods together with cloud seeding, birthed the concept that aeroplane contrails are authorities “chemtrails” for climate or inhabitants management. This conspiracy principle, which isn’t backed by scientific proof, is now supported by a third of the US inhabitants. In 2024, the UAE’s cloud-seeding programme was blamed by many for floods in Dubai, and rumours emerged that US President Joe Biden’s administration had brought on hurricanes Helen and Milton to hit Donald Trump-supporting southern states by means of cloud seeding or different nefarious applied sciences.

Related suspicions arose after social media customers seen that Rainmaker, contracted by the state, had been working in a distinct a part of Texas two days earlier than excessive rainfall brought on lethal flooding in Kerr county in 2025. Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a member of the US Home of Representatives, held a congressional listening to and proposed a legislation in opposition to climate modification. Three states have banned “climate modification”, regardless that there may be nonetheless no proof cloud seeding can have large-scale impacts. “We will generate precipitation, however to not the diploma of a flooding occasion,” says Friedrich.

Nonetheless, Rainmaker, whose founder Augustus Doricko was impressed by the SNOWIE experiment, claims it might make water-bankrupt areas solvent once more. Doricko, who can be the corporate’s CEO, says that inside six years, the corporate can have stopped the drying of the Nice Salt Lake and doubtlessly the Colorado river, too, an important supply of water for Utah and 6 different states.

Already, Rainmaker has raised greater than $31 million and has contracts with 5 states for cloud seeding. The concept is to make use of radar, satellites, climate balloons and synthetic intelligence to determine pockets of supercooled water after which promote a precise amount of precipitation to shoppers. “That is what will transfer cloud seeding ahead and take it out of the land of ‘you’re a snake-oil salesman’ to ‘no, that is precisely what we did’,” says Kaitlyn Suski, Rainmaker’s head of analysis.

Different initiatives are additionally looking for cheaper, more practical methods to engineer rain. In February, start-up Rain Enhancement Applied sciences stated it boosted snowpack in a Utah mountain vary by electrifying pure particles. Idaho Energy is misting liquid propane gasoline into clouds. Researchers within the UAE are firing lasers into them.

These efforts gained’t get near refilling giant our bodies of water, based on Friedrich, but it surely might assist reduce the impacts of drought, particularly by constructing snowpack that may soften step by step in spring and summer season. “It’s not the Holy Grail that solves all the issues,” she says.

What’s extra, cloud seeding would possibly distract from easier and more practical options. Over-consumption is the first reason for water shortage, such because the “use it or lose it” coverage that encourages farmers to take their full allocation of Colorado river water. Limiting water can damage agriculture and the financial system, whereas different conservation measures, like repairing leaky infrastructure or switching from canals to drip irrigation, might be costly. “That’s why they get loopy about cloud seeding,” says Madani. “Different options are very onerous.”

Boosting water provide by means of methods like cloud seeding might even improve consumption, an instance of a phenomenon referred to as the Jevon’s paradox. As an illustration, when tunnels and canals doubled the circulation within the Zayandeh-Rud river in Iran, water-hungry industries expanded, and farmers switched from livestock to peaches and almonds, main once more to shortage and conflicts between areas. With out measures to restrict demand, cloud seeding might turn into a “repair that backfires”, says Madani.

Fleming thinks we might study a lesson right here from Phaethon. When he makes an attempt to drive his father’s solar chariot, he loses management of the horses and scorches the planet, forming the world’s deserts. The historical past of cloud seeding – from botched navy operations to chemtrail conspiracy theories – echoes this legend in regards to the perils of hubris, says Fleming. “This concept of the massive lever, huge repair, controlling the world’s climate… it’s fraught with a number of unanswered questions.”