The Southern Nevada Water Authority on Thursday voted to accept a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to fund cloud seeding in other Western states whose rivers feed the parched desert region.
The weather modification method uses planes and ground-based cannons to shoot silver iodide crystals into clouds, attracting moisture to the particles that falls as additional snow and rain.
The funding comes as key reservoirs on the Colorado River hit record lows and booming Western cities and industries fail to adjust their water use to increasingly shrinking supplies. “This money from Reclamation is wonderful, we just have to decide how exactly it’s going to benefit us,” said Andrew Rickert, who coordinates Colorado’s cloud seeding for the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
The federal funding will go toward upgrading manual generators to ones that can be remotely operated, and using planes to seed clouds in key parts of the Upper Colorado River Basin, according to Southern Nevada Water Authority documents for its board meeting.Securing enough generators could be a challenge, Rickert said. “There’s not a lot of makers of cloud seeding generators,” he said. “Not only do we have to make sure we can find that, but that they could make as many as we need.
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