New drone-based cloud seeding campaigns aim to boost precipitation as water shortages grow, but scientists warn results are uneven and debates intensify.
A drone rising over Utah’s clouds is a vivid symbol of how desperate water managers are becoming: the aircraft carries a canister of powder designed to spark rainfall.. In November 2025. a quadcopter lifted off from a farm field at the foot of the Bannock mountain range north of Salt Lake City. climbing about 4. 000 metres into thick cloud.. Anti-icing propellers kept the system running as it dispersed yellow dust from its canister. using silver iodide—an approach intended to encourage precipitation and blunt the deadly dust storms that have plagued Utah’s capital.
The campaign takes aim at a wider crisis that is already reshaping daily life around the Great Salt Lake.. Fed by snowmelt from the Bannock mountains and nearby ranges. the lake has shrunk dramatically. with its surface area roughly halved since 2012.. As the dried lakebed expands. strong winds carry dust—along with toxic material—toward Salt Lake City. exposing millions of residents to so-called “forever chemicals” and heavy metals such as arsenic.
In this context, the promise of cloud seeding has moved beyond the laboratory and into public messaging.. The state has contracted the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker. and the company has promoted its concept of helping “refill” the Great Salt Lake through advertising campaigns.. But behind those big claims sits a persistent scientific doubt: whether the rainfall outcomes are reliable enough to matter for drought relief at scale.
That uncertainty is not limited to Utah.. Drought across the southwestern United States reflects what many researchers describe as an era of “water bankruptcy” driven by climate pressures and overuse.. More than 50 countries have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud-seeding technology. but the central question remains unresolved—how much rainfall can actually be engineered. and how consistently.. Kaveh Madani of the UN University Institute for Water. Environment and Health put it plainly: the main gap is knowing how effective cloud seeding truly is. even as desperation makes the idea attractive.
The stakes are partly scientific and partly political.. The belief that weather can be controlled is already fueling cross-border accusations of water theft and encouraging conspiracy theories about deadly flash floods.. That raises a second problem: cloud seeding may not just be competing with other water policies. but also with climate action itself—either by raising unrealistic expectations or by shifting attention away from the hard work of reducing emissions and managing demand.
Humans have long tried to master the sky.. Greek mythology describes Phaethon taking control of the sun chariot. while the 1930s Dust Bowl era in the United States saw “pluviculturists. ” often dubbed rain wizards. offering chemical approaches to break droughts.. Yet even when rain arrived. the lingering uncertainty was whether the weather change was caused by interventions or simply by shifting atmospheric conditions.
A major scientific foothold emerged in 1946 from an accidental observation.. Vincent Schaefer. working at General Electric’s House of Magic laboratory in upstate New York. was cooling a freezer during a hot July day by adding dry ice.. Instead of simply lowering the temperature. the freezer produced floating ice crystals—evidence that intense cold can freeze tiny droplets suspended in air.. Those supercooled droplets can remain liquid even at temperatures as low as minus 35°C. a property that later became central to the logic of cloud seeding.
The General Electric work quickly turned into a deliberate method.. Researchers began dropping dry ice from aircraft so that water vapor could condense on existing frozen particles. allowing droplets to grow and fall as snow or melt into rain.. Around the same time. Bernard Vonnegut discovered that silver iodide particles—with a crystal structure similar to ice—could serve as seed crystals.. By “fooling” supercooled droplets into rapid ice growth, silver iodide can trigger precipitation at warmer temperatures than dry ice.
That breakthrough also captured the imagination of the public and policymakers alike.. Vonnegut’s findings helped inspire Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 science-fiction novel “Cat’s Cradle. ” featuring “ice-nine. ” a fictional substance that freezes water on contact.. Meanwhile. the real-world implications were taken seriously: the US military moved to control weather research. seeing potential “battlefield” advantages in manipulating storms.
In one of the best-known early tests, US scientists attempted to redirect a hurricane using dry ice.. The storm reportedly turned and hit the coast again after passing Florida and heading toward open sea. though the role of the intervention was never established.. The broader pattern. however. was clear—cloud seeding became a matter of strategic interest. spreading to other countries including China and the Soviet Union. often with limited accountability.
During the same era, the politics of weather control hardened.. A secret US cloud-seeding effort being exposed led to public outrage during the Vietnam War era and helped sour congressional opinions.. In 1977, the US and USSR helped spearhead an international ban on environmental modification for military purposes, and funding fell.. Eventually, the US government abandoned cloud-seeding efforts, citing lack of convincing proof that it worked.
The modern revival of cloud seeding is driven less by military ambition than by shrinking freshwater supplies.. Climate change. urbanisation. and agriculture have combined to push many regions beyond their annual “income” of rain and snowmelt. forcing them to draw down groundwater—often described as long-term savings.. Madani points to a cascade of impacts: desertification. dust storms. falling groundwater tables. sinkholes. land subsidence. and shrinking lakes and rivers.
Weather-modification programs followed that pressure, spreading worldwide.. Utah’s shrinking Great Salt Lake is one highly visible example. but similar initiatives have appeared on every continent except Antarctica.. In Iran. drought helped fuel public protests. and both civilian authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard began cloud-seeding campaigns in an attempt to break a five-year drought.. Other countries—including India, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia—have also carried out large-scale efforts.
In hot, dry regions, the physics of precipitation makes seeding methods more varied.. Because many cloud droplets are too warm to freeze on contact with silver iodide. some programs disperse salt particles that draw moisture from the air and help build raindrops.. Gravity then overcomes the upward motions holding the droplets aloft. allowing them to descend. collide. and grow until they fall as precipitation.
The United Arab Emirates has been one of the most operational examples. conducting hundreds of missions each year using salt flares and investing tens of millions of dollars into research.. Radar specialist Roelof Bruintjes. who consulted on the program. emphasized a pragmatic view: even if operational cloud seeding does not always work—or works poorly—it still matters in places where water is emotionally and immediately tied to survival.
China has taken weather modification farthest in scale and ambition.. With water insecurity threatening more than 50 million people. the country has developed a vast program that includes rockets and planes. alongside thousands of anti-aircraft guns and cannons designed to fire salt and silver iodide into the sky.. China claims coverage over more than half the country, extending beyond 5 million square kilometres.. The goals listed range from boosting irrigation and hydropower to rinsing pollution from the air. preventing hailstorms. and regrowing melting glaciers.
China’s approach has also included attempts to influence monsoon patterns.. Since 2016. the “Sky River” project has been designed to divert water from the Indian monsoon toward cities and farms in the Yellow River basin.. The plan uses hundreds of remote-controlled combustion “burning chambers. ” essentially chimneys that burn silver iodide to intercept atmospheric moisture and precipitate it into the basin’s headwaters.
Even so. scientists warn that the hardest part is not creating precipitation in a controlled setting—it is producing enough of it to reduce drought.. Jeffrey French at the University of Wyoming described the question many people ask: whether the method can generate sufficient precipitation to meaningfully mitigate drought.. He noted that answering that is far more difficult.
Research teams have tried to pin down effects using experiments and comparisons.. Some trials have claimed precipitation increases of up to 20%. but without consistent control it is hard to separate seeding effects from natural variability between similar-looking storms.. A Wyoming study sought to address this by burning tanks of silver iodide on the ground beneath clouds over one mountain range while leaving a nearby range unseeded.. Ranges were randomly selected for seeding, and operations ran from 2007 to 2014 to account for annual differences in snowfall.. The results showed a precipitation rise of about 1.5%, which was statistically insignificant.
A stronger milestone arrived with the SNOWIE experiment in 2017.. French and colleagues became the first to show unequivocally that cloud seeding can produce precipitation under experimental conditions.. Aircraft released silver iodide flares over Idaho’s Sawtooth mountains. flying north and south so that falling flares formed a zigzag pattern as wind carried them east.. About 30 minutes later, truck-mounted radar systems detected ice crystals forming in that same pattern.. French argued that such a spatial pattern is unlikely to arise naturally.
The study also highlighted why expectations must be tempered.. Katja Friedrich of the University of Colorado Boulder. who led SNOWIE. said the amount of precipitation varies widely with location. season. and atmospheric conditions.. Some clouds simply do not have enough moisture to produce rain even if seeding triggers ice formation.
The debate has moved beyond science into geopolitics and accusations of unfairness.. James Fleming of Colby College in Maine. author of “Fixing the Sky. ” warned that if claims of large-scale redistribution are believed. it could spark conflict.. He also noted that far-reaching weather engineering overlaps with geoengineering ideas that aim to counter climate change by altering atmospheric processes. such as proposals to reflect sunlight by spraying seawater droplets into clouds.
In practice, these fears appear to shape disputes.. India has publicly blamed China’s weather modification for floods in states downstream of Tibet.. Iran has accused Israel and Turkey of “cloud stealing,” alleging that precipitation intended for Iran ended up elsewhere.. Yet the basic science complicates the intuition that rainfall is always a zero-sum contest between regions downwind.
Friedrich argues that rainfall is not necessarily transferred like a fixed resource.. Many clouds precipitate only a small fraction of their moisture, and some rain falls over the ocean.. In that setting. cloud seeding can end up speeding the natural water cycle rather than simply redirecting what would have fallen elsewhere.
Despite that, public trust has often been undermined by conspiracy theories.. A 1996 US Air Force report on “owning the weather. ” including cloud seeding. helped fuel the idea that aircraft contrails are “chemtrails” used for weather control or population management.. While not supported by evidence, the conspiracy has reportedly gained traction among a substantial portion of the US population.
The modern era of misinformation has also tangled with real-world disasters.. In 2024. the UAE’s cloud-seeding program was blamed by many for flooding in Dubai. and online rumours circulated about whether US President Joe Biden’s administration—among other claimed technologies—had played a role in hurricanes Helen and Milton hitting southern states that supported Donald Trump.
Other allegations have targeted US state-contracted seeding as well.. After a company linked to Rainmaker was reportedly operating in another part of Texas two days before deadly flooding in Kerr County in 2025. suspicions spread widely online.. A congressional hearing involving Marjorie Taylor Greene proposed legislation against weather modification.. Several states have moved to ban “weather modification. ” even though there remains no evidence that cloud seeding can produce large-scale impacts comparable to severe flooding events.. Friedrich stressed that while precipitation can be generated. it cannot reliably be scaled to the level needed to replicate or trigger a catastrophe.
Rainmaker’s own claims are driven by a business model that aims to convert seeding from guesswork into measurable delivery.. The company says its founder Augustus Doricko was inspired by SNOWIE.. Doricko claims that within six years. Rainmaker could stop the Great Salt Lake from drying up and potentially slow drying in the Colorado River. a major source of water for Utah and several neighboring states.
Rainmaker says it has raised more than $31 million and holds contracts with five states for cloud seeding.. Its approach is built around radar, satellites, weather balloons, and artificial intelligence designed to locate pockets of supercooled water.. The company then aims to sell an exact quantity of precipitation to clients.. Kaitlyn Suski. the head of research. framed this as a way to move cloud seeding toward “what we did” rather than “snake-oil” accusations.
Alongside Rainmaker, other efforts are pursuing ways to improve effectiveness or reduce costs.. Rain Enhancement Technologies, a startup, announced that it boosted snowpack in a Utah mountain range by electrifying natural particles.. Idaho Power has experimented with misting liquid propane fuel into clouds. and researchers in the UAE have explored firing lasers into clouds.
Friedrich cautions that even these innovations may not refill large bodies of water. but she argues they could still reduce the impacts of drought—particularly if they can help build snowpack that melts gradually through spring and summer.. She also rejects the idea of a single “Holy Grail,” saying cloud seeding cannot solve everything.
There is a further concern that cloud seeding could divert attention from the most fundamental drivers of water scarcity: how much people use and how efficiently they manage demand.. Madani points to policies that encourage farmers to take their full allocation—often summarized as “use it or lose it”—which can worsen pressure when supplies tighten.. Limiting water can damage agriculture and the economy. and other conservation steps such as fixing leaking infrastructure or switching from canals to drip irrigation can be costly. which helps explain why cloud seeding draws so much interest.
In some cases, boosting supply could even worsen consumption.. Madani references Jevon’s paradox, in which improvements that increase available water can expand demand, potentially restoring scarcity.. He cites the example of tunnels and canals doubling flow in Iran’s Zayandeh-Rud river. after which water-hungry industries and crop choices expanded. and conflicts returned.
Fleming sees a cautionary pattern in the history of weather intervention, comparing it to the Greek myth of Phaethon.. When Phaethon tries to drive his father’s sun chariot, he loses control and scorches the planet, creating deserts.. For Fleming. the rise of “big lever” attempts to control the sky echoes the danger of hubris: unanswered questions remain. and the consequences of overconfidence could be just as damaging as drought itself.
For now, the drones and flares offer a tantalizing possibility in a world facing dwindling water reliability.. Yet the science—and the politics—around cloud seeding remain tightly bound to uncertainty: precipitation can be produced. but translating that into dependable relief for entire regions. without side effects or misinformation-driven backlash. is still the unresolved challenge.
cloud seeding Great Salt Lake drought silver iodide water shortages weather modification geoengineering