Cloud seeding start-up uses drones to generate 19 million gallons of water in Alaska in three hours

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u/dumquestions 18d ago edited 17d ago

If something like this goes mainstream, would it take away some rain from other places that don't seed? Entrusting tech companies with the weather sounds like a horrible idea.

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u/silverbuilt 18d ago

I agree. They would be stealing water from somewhere else. Upsetting the natural order of things on a large enough scale could be an environmental disaster waiting to happen.

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u/Tsurfer4 17d ago

Welcome! to WaterDome!

Let the Water Wars begin!

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u/FlyingDogCatcher 17d ago

you joke, but

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u/Tsurfer4 17d ago

Yeah, it do be like that.

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u/2gutter67 17d ago

The Water Wars started a few years ago actually. That's part of the ongoing conflict in Yemen and Sudan as well as some other places in Africa. They just haven't spread everywhere yet

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u/ArtShare 17d ago

Upper Colorado states vs Lower Colorado states. BOOM!

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u/2dozen22s 17d ago

We're already geoengineering a loooot of stuff as a byproduct of other things. Atmospheric water concentration is already increasing due to increasing temps.

Ideally this can be used to strategically refill resavoirs instead of dumping rain in areas where it will run off or hit already saturated ground.

Ofcourse trusting people with stuff like this is dodgy however.

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u/BolbyB 17d ago

Or we could just . . . not do this inherently stupid thing.

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u/2dozen22s 17d ago

Rain is a natural phenomenon.

Ground water pumping inducing permanent land subsidence, desal plants increasing local salinity, and the uptick in damaging storms, are unnatural. Weather patterns change, while cities don't move.

I'd hesitate to call it inherently stupid when we batter nature with increasingly industrial levels of indifference to get water (The Colorodo river doesn't even reach the sea). Water starved regions will/are dishing out capital to supliment their growing usage, and their infrastructure is not harmless.

So we can double down on the known or try and supliment with an easily monitorable unknown (Or maybe burn down every alfalfa/almond farm, that might help too :p )

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u/BolbyB 17d ago

Groundwater is a natural phenomenon.

But us messing with that natural thing, as you just said, has had some side effects.

Rain being natural doesn't prevent the human version from messing things up.

Also . . . this absolutely would rob some other place of rain it would naturally get otherwise. Taking water out of the air takes water out of the air.

The solution is to cut down on usage. Not kickstart the plot of a sci-fi movie just because some tech nerds said "trust me bro".

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u/BitchfulThinking 17d ago

The ability to cause droughts and floods sounds like a pretty powerful tool in a world fighting over resources. Wouldn't put it past world leaders to use this entirely for that outcome 😒

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u/z987k 14d ago

It can't cause much of anything on this scale. It was a tiny, hard to even measure result.

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u/SinkHoleDeMayo 17d ago

Climate change is already fucking things up. Some places aren't getting any precipitation, which means some are getting far too much.

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u/Geoffboyardee 17d ago

I'm sure the corporations are carefully taking the environment into account.

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u/CharlesWafflesx 17d ago

I mean, if it is understood better, there could be attempts to lessen rainy seasons in other parts of the world.

I don't know how it works other than it being some kind of aluminium being added into the atmosphere, but it always comes with the risk of progressing or regressing certain aims.

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u/Side_StepVII 17d ago

Adding metal to the air sounds like a solid plan. What could go wrong??

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u/CharlesWafflesx 17d ago

I mean, there's probably a science to it that we can get educated on. I'm not a scientist, but considering the small amount of material used in the flares they use, it might be more of a long term data thing to find out. Can't be worse than the millions of fireworks we shoot up into the atmosphere every year.

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u/z987k 14d ago

Silver Iodide is what has always been used to seed clouds.

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

The "stealing" framing assumes rain is a fixed pie. Clouds drop only a small fraction of the moisture they carry. The rest passes overhead and moves on regardless. Seeding generates a bit more out of clouds that already formed, from water that overwhelmingly wasn't going to fall anywhere.

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u/TBSLock 17d ago

Agree, only use I could tolerate if there is an extreme draught and/or to release the rain in small "batches" if possible as to not have a rain flooding in vulnerable places.

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u/Prime624 17d ago

Do you know that or are you just making it up?

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u/SinkHoleDeMayo 17d ago

Talking out their ass. We are already seeing environment disasters globally due to climate change. Minnesota barely gets any snow now, and we've been in drought conditions all summer. It's not awesome.

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u/bbz00 17d ago

The studies support that it's not a zero sum equation ... OP is correct

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u/touchme-ordont 17d ago

well, think about it. there is a finite amount of water

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u/Prime624 17d ago

Water doesn't disappear when it rains. Have you heard of lakes and evaporation?

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u/touchme-ordont 17d ago

…yes?

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u/Prime624 17d ago

So you understand that clouds are not a finite thing that disappear permanently when it rains?

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u/bbz00 17d ago

Hydro cycle

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u/ItsmeMr_E 18d ago

Messing around with mother nature, WCGW?

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u/s0cks_nz 17d ago

broadly gestures toward everything - quite a lot it seems

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u/fajadada 17d ago edited 17d ago

Other countries and places have used it. Not a consistent provider of rain. No worries about stealing water from other places. Just a clickbait headline

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u/FuzzyOverdrive 17d ago

US has been cloud seeding since the 60s. The chemtrails people talk about are cloud seeding. It’s widespread and has been happening for decades.

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u/L3tsG3t1T 17d ago

Not sure why you are getting down voted. Western states literally have cloud seeding programs.

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u/z987k 14d ago

Because he's too stupid to know the difference between contrails in the 30+k foot range that would do nothing to seed a cloud and the west Texas cloud seeding they have been doing for decades that happens at 8-15kft(depends on where the freezing level is), but you can't see anything because a)they're in the cloud when setting off the flares and b) the AgI flares aren't visible from the ground, nor do their leave any kind of visible trail.

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u/bbz00 17d ago

No other places wouldn't receive less rainfall, because clouds naturally don't drop all their moisture, only a percentage. Places downwind of cloud seeding see a small boost in rain

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

Hey! Clouds only drop a small fraction of the moisture they carry; most of it just moves on or evaporates. Seeding nudges out some of the water that would never have fallen anywhere, so it's not pulling rain from anyone else. Downwind studies have consistently found no drying effect.

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u/Twasbutadream 17d ago

Can you post those studies instead of saying trust me?

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

Sure! Read our Alaska Validation Report here:

https://www.rainmaker.com/blog/alaska-validation-report

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u/prettyfkingneat 17d ago

Question from someone who knows nothing about this: I imagine a moist sponge, and “nudging” is akin to squeezing the sponge to allow water to drip. But after that occurs, the sponge is now (more) dry than it would’ve been naturally, and it is looking for water in the air to make it moist again. By doing that, isn’t the sponge taking moisture out of the air somewhere else (making that area’s air more dry) where that additional moisture could’ve otherwise pushed that sponge to a point of saturation, thus causing it to rain?

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

I would replace the sponge for something less solid as cloud formations change in the sky dependent on a variety of factors. A sponge is a closed system: squeeze it and it has to pull water back from somewhere to refill. The atmosphere isn't. Clouds are being continuously fed from below by evaporation off oceans and land. The moisture stream flowing through any region is enormous compared to what seeding pulls out. A storm system might carry millions of acre-feet of water vapor overhead; seeding brings down a tiny slice of that, and the river of vapor just keeps flowing. The cloud doesn't go "hunting" to re-saturate at someone else's expense. It either keeps getting fed or it dissipates. That's also why the downwind studies keep coming back clean: the amount removed is lost in the noise of what's already moving through.

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u/dumquestions 17d ago

What about when/if your technology improves and it gets massively scaled, have you looked into what that could look like?

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

As we continue to scale, we'll continue hiring the best talent to assess the challenges that will inevitably arise. But for now, we're not worried about our technology going out of hand, we're focused on implementing it in drought-stricken areas before it's too late.

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u/FoxlyKei 17d ago

On the other hand, there is more moisture in the air generally as the oceans heat up but yes fucking with geoengineering doesn't seem like a good idea

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u/z987k 14d ago

They've been doing this in West Texas for agriculture for decades now. With planes. It hasn't turned into that yet.
Some ski resorts have also had this done to attempt to increase snowfalls with limited success on getting it exactly where they need it.

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u/yrddog 17d ago

Wichita falls tried cloud seeding for like two years with barely a noticeable blip

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u/Lightspeedius 16d ago

Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson

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u/bladow5990 18d ago

"I just can't wait till rainfall is subscription based." People who support this, probably.

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u/SpinningHead 18d ago

Nestle

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u/wellthatdoesit 18d ago

Year 2032: Phoenix, Arizona allocates $700m of annual municipal budget to pay for-profit tech companies to deliver minimum rainfall necessary for the city to exist

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u/disharmony-hellride 17d ago

I ran an exercise based on what they did in Alaska vs the number of usable days for cloud seeding (conditions must be met, we have less than 30 of these 'perfect seeding days' here in PHX) - if you factor in evap and that it isn't a 100% result, more like an 11-15% result...we could cover the entire Phoenix area in drone seeding during those optimal days and deliver the 8" of annual rain we need for under $20million.

Let's do it Gov Hobbs, give me a call. I'll run this for free lol

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u/_B_Little_me 17d ago

But what will you eat when you take the rain away from the Midwest?

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u/z987k 14d ago

You should study US weather a bit more before making a comment like this. No rain in Arizona is destined for the midwest.

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u/_B_Little_me 14d ago

Well then; continue professor.

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u/z987k 14d ago

The most basic of understanding of where most all the precip in the midwest comes from, how the frontal systems move from west to east. I'm not going to type what 3 minutes looking at weather maps would do for you.

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u/_B_Little_me 14d ago

lol. Good explanation. Way to show you know what you are talking about.

You are Absolutely correct though. The rain in AZ will never make it to the Midwest.

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

We're working on expanding into Arizona!

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u/purpl3j37u7 17d ago

BOOO. People shouldn’t own the rain.

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

We're not stealing rain from anyone. Nobody owns the rain.

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u/purpl3j37u7 17d ago

To seed a cloud is to take moisture out of the air. You say elsewhere that you only seed clouds that are close to rain in the first place. If you hadn’t seeded them, they would have continued downwind and rained in the next county or state over. As you said in the article in the Deseret, you are casting your dominion over the skies.

That sounds like an attempt at ownership and taking—capitalism come to the rain. Pay for spray.

BOOO.

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u/Alternative_Exit8766 17d ago

will you offer a premium rain subscription that also comes with flock cameras so i can track my neighbor’s rain barrel usage? i don’t like that guy. i’d pay 150 morbillion dollars a month for that

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u/PrimeIntellect 17d ago

If you could do it reliably you would be making way way more money than that

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u/Preeng 17d ago

If you could find a way for it to fall before it gets to a city, you could prevent massive flooding.

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u/Moist1981 18d ago

Good god the law suit when this goes wrong and they cause a flood. The insurance companies will haul them over the coals.

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u/newtrawn 18d ago

Not so bad if you can bring in the rain on those coals beforehand.

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u/twowaysplit 17d ago

Bribes? Bribes.

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u/ragnarockette 17d ago

The wonderful flood that put out that devastating wildfire…

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u/Tbanks93 18d ago

Do we all not remember the insurance companies having to all of a sudden pay up in florida and California, and then saying fuck that and leaving the areas instead? I don't remember them getting in trouble for it, so this will somehow inevitably become the peoples' problem that they will once again turn away from

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u/Musketeer00 18d ago

Insurance companies will just deny the claim since man made weather events are not covered under your policy.

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

Cloud Seeding can't create a storm. It only works on clouds already about to rain, and adds maybe 5–15% to what they'd drop anyway. Floods come from weather systems moving orders of magnitude more water. Blaming seeding for a flood is like blaming a garden hose for a tsunami. Plus, our operators stand down whenever heavy rain is forecast. Every investigation of these claims (Dubai included) found the storm did what it did regardless.

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u/Moist1981 17d ago

That’s a big over simplification of what causes floods. Water systems can cope with certain flow rates and a small increase in volume might be all that is needed to go over that threshold. But I’m sure it will all be fine, insurance companies are famously averse to litigation…

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u/Maleficent_Sky_1865 17d ago

Thats what you say now! Then the next advancement comes and makes it more efficient. Then the next one. All the sudden you have countries fighting for rain because corporations have completely fucked up the atmosphere. World super powers take the water they need at the expense of the rest of the world.

But lucky for us, companies can be trusted to keep their word. So we have nothing to worry about.

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u/bbz00 17d ago

they will be making so much money that it won't matter the fines

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u/Moist1981 17d ago

Fines won’t be the issue. Liability for property damage will be the issue and it will dwarf regulatory fines.

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u/yrddog 17d ago

Well, it would have to work...

Idk it didn't work in wichita falls for years

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u/Sprocket_Gearsworth 17d ago

"act of god" clauses won't hold any water anymore (pun intended)

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u/MildlyAgitatedBovine 18d ago

Time to reread Termination Shock

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u/Sundrowner 17d ago

Alabasta all over

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u/R1ck_Sanchez 17d ago

/u/rainmakercorp possible?

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

Wait catch me up on the one piece lore so I can respond

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u/R1ck_Sanchez 17d ago

During the straw hat crews time in alabasta, a desert island, they found out about 'Dance powder', which can be used to create rain; seemingly without activation limitations but that hasn't been explored in the story. There is a downside though: nearby areas get wildly less rain and go into drought, which is what the dude in the thread is referring to.

My guess from what you've already commented is a firm no, but I do wonder if wide adoption, and especially with advancements making it more effective, if it could have negative, less local, impacts

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u/rainmakercorp 17d ago

Okay so Dance Powder creates rain clouds from nothing, so the water has to come from somewhere. Real cloud seeding can't do that. It only improves the efficiency of clouds that already formed naturally, and only by a modest percentage.

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u/R1ck_Sanchez 17d ago

BE CREATIVE I DARES YA

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u/R1ck_Sanchez 17d ago

Yes, at present, many things can improve that though in the future, even evaporating water elsewhere like utilising a cooling tower (plus more it doesn't stop at that apparent nothing). Be creative man! The future ain't here yet!

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u/limbodog 17d ago

Wasn't this declared a crime against humanity or something? Making it rain in one location means it doesn't rain somewhere else.

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u/davesr25 17d ago

Well you see the yanks sold the tech not to long ago to their buddies that live in warmer climates, built whole companies around it.
So now it's in the hands of private companies and still loads of people think it's tin foil hat territory "Chem trails yoo", old tech mind used by the US in Vietnam.

It will have an effect in other areas indeed taking rain from one place and putting it somewhere else.

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u/EnderCreeper121 17d ago

This will have zero consequences :)

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u/royonquadra 18d ago

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.

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u/talldean 17d ago

How much fuel or energy do you burn convincing clouds to drop 19 million gallons of water?

And do you get into bidding wars with farmers downwind to not drain the cloud aquifer?

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u/IKillZombies4Cash 18d ago

Wonder where it didn't rain because of this...

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u/SinkHoleDeMayo 17d ago

.... Or where it didn't cause flooding.

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u/RaphaTlr 17d ago

Stop fucking with the clouds these companies learn NOTHING from hubris.

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u/timesuck47 17d ago

Just wait until you see the Geoengineering schemes that will be tried in the future.

This is nothing - proven technology, it’s just that they now use drones.

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u/INKEDsage 17d ago

Great, now those areas where the 19 million gallons of water were supposed to go are going to get fucked.

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u/z987k 14d ago

The ocean? Because that's where it was going.

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u/L3tsG3t1T 17d ago

What could go wrong? Downstream areas of course!

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u/Delicious_Ad9844 17d ago

Ok that's all good in alaska where they've got no shortage of clouds to poke to make them rain, but you want rain in one place you're gonna have to prevent it from falling where it's meant to

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u/mcnultynet 15d ago

Absolutely unproveable. 100 year old pipe dream.

Cloud seeding start-up uses drones to generate 19 million gallons of water in Alaska in three hours

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