Cloud-seeding: Are scientists ‘playing God’ or stopping climate-induced droughts?

Scientists have been seeding clouds, dispersing chemicals that encourage cloud formatting and extra precipitation, since the 1940s, but the idea still remains deeply controversial, according to Julie Gondzar, of Wyoming’s Weather Modification Program.

She’s been the subject of angry calls accusing her and her colleagues of “playing God” or “stealing moisture from the storm” and reallocating to other areas, she recently told CNN. The reality, however, is more nuanced, she says.

"A lot of people think it’s manipulating the weather pattern," she said. "We are essentially just playing with cloud dynamics and cloud physics, on a super, super-small scale."

The programme, which began in 2003 as part of a study and has been fully operational for the last eight seasons, uses a plane to fire flares containing silver iodide into an existing cloud, small molecules which encourage water to freeze and clouds to form.

Causing more snowfall is an urgent need in the state, and across the West. More than two thirds of Wyoming is experiencing severe drought, according to the US Drought Monitor.

Not everyone is sold on the ultimate impact of new technology, which has been used in states across the US and more than 50 countries around the world.

Encouraging more precipitation in one area won’t do enough on its own to end the mega-drought striking the west, or to impact the underlying climate crisis which is helping to fuel water shortages and weather changes in so many different regions of the world.

“I don’t think cloud seeding will solve the problem but it can help,” Katja Friedrich, a University of Colorado researcher, toldThe Guardian last year. “It needs to be part of a broader water plan that involves conserving water efficiently, we can’t just focus on one thing. Also there is a question whether you will be able to do it in a changing climate – you need cold temperatures and once it gets too warm you aren’t able to do the cloud seeding.”

The science surrounding cloud-seeding is also very much still be developed, with mixed results in terms of its genuine impact.

Last year, a consortium of university researchers studying a cloud-seeding experiment in Idaho found “unambiguously that cloud seeding can boost snowfall across a wide area if the atmospheric conditions are favorable,” including making it snow “where none had existed” in the past.

Others point to studies like an evaluating of cloud-seeding in Wyoming between 2008 and 2013, where precipitation was only shown to have increased by about 3 per cent, not statistically significant. In other words, the impact was modest enough that any increase could just be the result of random chance.

Still, a wide variety of institutions have embraced cloud-seeding, from US ski resorts, bone-dry Western water districts, and Chinese officials hoping to clear the skies ahead of major international events.

Some are concerned, however, with countries like China planning massive cloud-seeding networks, that more study is needed of the chemicals used to encourage precipitation.

“I’m not entirely sure if I would advocate for people to start doing this aggressively right now,” Armin Sorooshian, a chemical and environmental engineering professor at the University of Arizona, told The Daily Beast. “We need to learn more.”

He’s helping lead a NASA project called ACTIVATE, which will study cloud-aerosol interactions.

There’s also a political dimension to cloud-seeding.

“There are more and more issues like, ‘you are stealing my water’. If you follow the press, you have these messages, like Iran is accusing Israel and so forth,” Professor Andrea Flossmann, a weather modification expert at the World Meteorological Organization, told Wired.

Scientifically, what’s going on is more subtle: an incremental increase in participation in already existing weather systems, rather than some wholesale creation and redistribution of water.

Still, despite the controversy, cloud-seeding looks set to become a major part of the climate-fighting agenda.