It's a Potential 'Breakthrough' in Cloud Seeding Push

Some drought-stricken states in the West are investing in a new way to bring rain and snow—using drones to seed clouds with silver iodide. Utah and Idaho in particular are paying the start-up company Rainmaker millions of dollars annually, and the company says radar and satellite data show it has generated 143 million gallons of freshwater, reports the Deseret News. That's not a huge amount in the grand scheme, but it's still potentially a big deal, notes the Washington Post: If "confirmed, it could be a breakthrough, making it the first commercial cloud-seeding operation to prove it made precipitation."

That "if" looms large—the results have not yet been peer reviewed. "If they want to be credible, they have to go through this, because otherwise it's just numbers on a piece of paper," Katja Friedrich, an expert in the field at the University of Colorado Boulder, tells the Post. Still, the results appear to hold promise, particularly because Rainmaker has swapped planes for much cheaper drones in the process. Utah is perhaps the most aggressive state on this front, with a cloud-seeding budget that's jumped from $350,000 to $7 million in five years. State officials argue that in a dry West, even incremental gains—and safer, cheaper drones—are worth pursuing, as long as the science ultimately backs them up.