Rainmaker’s Alaska Cloud Seeding Produces 19 Million Gallons of Water

This August, cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker used recently developed radar tracking techniques to estimate that its cloud-seeding efforts produced about 19 million gallons of surplus precipitation in three hours. The results are the company’s own analysis and have not been definitively proved or reviewed by a third party. Nevertheless, they are an encouraging step toward Rainmaker’s mission.

Cloud seeding requires supercooled clouds, or those below 23℉ (-5℃), for ice crystals to condense and produce excess precipitation. As a result, cloud seeding takes place almost exclusively in winter. However, testing took place in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which often experiences prime cloud-seeding conditions in late summer due to its northerly latitude. The company used two drones for a total of 10 flights and about 374 grams of silver iodide, the compound most commonly used to attract condensation in cloud seeding operations. 

• Related: Cloud Seeding: What is It, How Does It Work, and Does It Make a Difference?

How Does Cloud Seeding Work?

Cloud seeding optimizes clouds that are already present and contain the right combination of moisture and temperature. The technology was pioneered in the 1940s when scientists discovered that ice crystals would condense around dry ice. 

Rainmaker’s drones release tiny amounts of silver iodide into suitable clouds. The particles act as ice nuclei. Generally speaking, clouds have far more moisture than ever reaches the ground. The limiting variable is moisture finding an initial particle it can condense on, as there are only so many naturally occurring particles in the atmosphere. That’s where cloud seeding comes into play.

Rainmaker’s New Model

People have been cloud seeding for about 80 years; it’s the earliest scientifically backed weather-modification technique we developed. So what makes Rainmaker different?

Radar Signatures

Rainmaker’s business model revolves around two developments. The first is the use of tracking systems that identify unique cloud-seeing radar signatures. In 2019, researchers published findings that pinpointed certain radar patterns that appear only in the context of cloud seeding. Rainmaker is the first commercial cloud seeding company to use these techniques.

Because no definitive proof of effectiveness existed, past cloud seeding companies have had difficulty moving past skeptics. It’s one of the reasons the technology has never gained widespread attention from the general public. Rainmaker’s 26-year-old CEO, Augustus Doricko, believes that investing in proof will eventually attract wider investment in cloud-seeding technologies.

Drones

Second, Rainmaker is a pioneer in using drones to disperse cloud-seeding particulates into the atmosphere. Traditional methods include flying airplanes into supercooled cloud layers and firing particulates from the ground with propane-powered burners. 

Rainmaker has zeroed in on several advantages of using drones that it believes will help the company remain competitive. For one, drones require much less fuel, which saves on energy costs and is far more sustainable than, say, flying planes high into the atmosphere every time conditions align. With the help of models and AI tools, drones also allow for more tailored dispersal of particulates. Rainmaker hopes this will increase the efficiency of each seeding opportunity and allow the company to quickly scale its operations across a wider geographic area. 

They also eliminate the need to put pilots into turbulent, icy clouds. “With our manned research aircraft, they often have to get out of the cloud because they ice up,” said Katja Friedrich, a cloud microphysics expert at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was an author on the 2019 paper determining cloud-seeding signatures on radar. “So it’s not really a nice Sunday afternoon flight.”

Can Rainmaker Scale? 

Many cloud seeding operations have come and gone over the years. Some operations were government-funded; almost all have been relatively local. 

Rainmaker hopes to cut costs and quickly scale. Using a fleet of drones, if effective, is far more affordable than flying a plane. It would also allow the company to operate simultaneously across the country, with individual teams running small drone fleets. 

Rainmaker has attracted over $50 million of start-up funding for its venture. Though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to other spheres of technology, that’s an exciting number in the meteorology world. 

Rising drought levels across the West may eventually push states to pour more money into cloud seeding. Rainmaker hopes to capture much of this new capital. Utah, for example, has increased its cloud-seeding investment 20-fold over the last several years, from $350,000 to $7 million. “We’re looking at a really, really kind of dire situation, drastic times, and we’ve got to be smart with the water we have,” explained the Utah Department of Natural Resources director Joel Ferry in an interview with the Washington Post. “We can’t be stuck in kind of the old ways. And a big part of that is using cloud seeding.”

What Cloud Seeding Could Mean for Snow

After the successful demo in Alaska, CEO Augustus Doricko took to the platform X, stating, “In the future, Rainmaker will protect and restore glaciers with man-made snowfall…this demonstration shows how Rainmaker will add new water to the Colorado River and Great Salt Lake in the coming months.”

Traditional estimates of excess precipitation generated by cloud seeding range from around six to 12%. And Rainmaker hopes to meet or exceed these numbers, according to Doricko. However, for the time being, some scientists remain skeptical, at least until a formal review process of the company’s tracking of radar signatures. “If they want to be credible, they have to go through this [formal peer review], because otherwise it’s just numbers on a piece of paper,” said Katja Friedrich, who was involved in the original 2019 paper mentioned above. 

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Of course, it’s difficult for SnowBrains readers not to imagine a utopian scenario. A small army of drones taking to the skies to extract as much precipitable water from clouds as possible, increasing snow totals by 20%. For ski resorts, the investment could mirror or replace the dollars that have gone into artificial snow machines, which Rainmaker rightly claims are no substitute for the real thing. 

Tempering Expectations

For now, there are too many unknowns to get overly excited. Climate change remains a formidable barrier for the future of skiing. It’s unlikely that cloud seeding is going to tip the scales anytime soon. Besides, many states, like Colorado, already seed clouds, so the ski areas may have already accounted for these gains in some regions. 

“It’s exciting that they’re revisiting this challenge of weather modification with new tools and new techniques,” said Kara Lamb, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia, in the Washington Post interview.“But I think there are still fundamental questions about how effective weather modification can ever be on a large scale.”