Amid two decades of drought, cloud seeding — using airplanes or ground equipment to waft rain-and-snow-making particles into clouds — is on the rise in the Rockies.
Utah-based North American Weather Consultants holds cloud seeding contracts throughout the U.S. West.
But snow — as much as possible — is at the heart of the Cammans family business, Utah-based North American Weather Consultants, which holds cloud seeding contracts throughout the U.S. West, centered in the Rocky Mountains. Not everybody believes cloud seeding is a worthwhile remedy. Some experts say conserving water is a better, more down-to-earth way to ensure enough water to go around. Juicing clouds to produce marginally more precipitation, they say, is an iffy alternative.
Their approach: shoot silver iodide into clouds, where moisture binds to the particles, forms ice and falls as snow. That snowpack high in the mountains serves as year-round cold storage for water that’s released as it melts. Cloud seeding in the U.S. got “oversold” and federal funding dried up in the 1990s and early 2000s, said Frank McDonough, a scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada.
“That cost per acre-foot was so low, it’s kind of a no brainer,” said Jake Serago, water resources engineer with the division. Each is a two-wheeled trailer containing a tank of silver iodide released by a roaring, propane-fueled flame atop a metal mast. There’s a communications antenna for signals to turn the generator on and off, depending on conditions.
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