Humans finally figured out how to make it rain

For decades, this region in West Texas has been plagued by drought, with reservoirs and lakes often nearly empty. The grass has turned brown and the crops are having problems. The last

rain

was in October. We spent all the winter months without

rain

. Our cotton, as you can see, not every acre of our imagined cotton has arisen on bare, bone-dry soil. In the Texas heat things can sometimes seem bleak, but what if I told you there is a way to help solve this problem by flying into the clouds and making it rain? This graph shows Texas droughts over the last thousand years.

All of these drops below this line represent a severe drought and Texas has a long history of them. This light blue section is data from tree ring observations. The dark blue is modern data from the last hundred years. and suggests that droughts are getting hotter and more severe, which has a lot to do with climate change. The average temperature in Texas has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the early 1900s and the rate of increase is pushing record temperatures. heat Over 100 degree days Dangerous heat is already changing its tent this year Texas has already reached record temperatures, even here in the West Texas city of San Angelo, some farmers in this area of ​​Texas deny that human activity is driving climate change, but everyone agrees on something.

What's definitely getting worse this year is definitely different before Hotter or drier jeans Acres of bare cotton fields are some of the clearest evidence of the damage a drought can do when it's so dry we just can't pump enough water to

make

it crops. that grow looking here, none of these acres will be harvested, usually the rain is absorbed into the soil, the plants and crops absorb the water they need and the rest keeps the soil moist, fills the aquifers and the runoff fills the lakes, eventually evaporates and transpiration from plants releases water into the atmosphere where it is converted back into precipitation.

This is the water cycle that keeps us alive when temperatures are unusually warm. This cycle is interrupted. Plants retain water and transpire less and soil evaporation occurs too quickly. It destabilizes a cycle and prolongs the lack of rain and although this lack of rain hurts everyone, it is the farmers who feel it the most some days, it is quite discouraging. Look, we always want to be farmers, you want to produce a good harvest. To plant it, we want to raise it, we want to grow it, there is nothing more beautiful than wasting cotton, but it is not going to happen and we know that living here does not always happen, but it is a struggle, but there is a technology.

That can help protect this cycle is called cloud seeding and involves making the clouds produce more rain, so I visited the West Texas Weather Modification Association, one of many organizations around the world that practice cloud seeding. clouds and basically what you're doing in the sky is you're kind of persuading the cloud to produce more rain, exactly like that, we're just getting more rain out of a cloud than would be the case on stormy days. Pilots load small planes with these special flares filled with chemicals like silver iodide and fly to the edge of storms to launch the flares into the clouds.

Foreign storm clouds are filled with droplets of supercold liquid water, meaning they are at subzero temperatures, but they are still liquid. These droplets are too small to freeze and too small to coalesce. They're also too light for Gravity to pull down, so they just float on the cloud. They enter silver iodide. The silver iodide particles mimic ice crystals and provide a kind of scaffolding for the ice to form. That ice then grows very efficiently by consuming the super-cold liquid droplets. Usually after about 20 minutes they grow large enough and fall from the cloud as more rain falls, meaning fuller lakes, rivers and aquifers.

Then, consistently, the hope is that cloud seeding can help build up water, this keeps the soil moist longer and can help protect the water cycle. When things get very dry during a drought when we visited Texas there were no storms in the forecast, but local pilots Derek and Tanner took us up into the sky for a practice run so we could see the process up close, we're ready when you are. ready oh that's shooting up all the iodized silver it's going into the clouds so that trail is literally the chemicals there's no chemicals coming out okay let's go to the RGB we're going to be late.

Cloud seeding technology has been around since the 1940s, but demonstrating the effects of cloud seeding on the ground has been a struggle. One of the biggest challenges in weather modification is the ability to statistically show that it works. How do we know that a cloud was not going to do what it did in the future? On a day-to-day basis it's hard to see, but over a 20-year span where we have thousands of fixed clouds compared to non-fixed clouds, we're seeing increases of 15 percent. Other cloud seeding programs have also shown increases in precipitation of about 15 percent. percent, but they haven't met the standards of the scientific community, the researchers would probably prefer us to go to this Cloud, they rolled the dice, okay, it's strange, so let's move to this Cloud, it's the same, let's see we can't do it .

Our programs expect each cloud to be settled, so we can't do the random placement that the scientific community would like to see, but today tests using clouds on snowy mountains are providing more evidence that cloud seeding works in A 2017 study in Idaho radar images captured ice crystals forming in the same pattern as the cloud-seeding aircraft flew and then tracked snowfall on the ground. Many variables change from the mountains of Idaho to the plains of Texas and thunderstorms are shorter, smaller and change faster. Even more than blizzards, the Idaho experiment has added to a growing body of evidence that cloud seeding works.

So far, researchers have seen few downsides. Most studies like this one conducted in Wyoming in 2014 have found a negligible environmental impact and cost of flying a pilot with flares are relatively low, especially compared to the value of water in West Texas. The program is funded by local water districts and costs only a few cents per acre, but even if this technology works, it only works when rain is already forecast, if only we could. to create a cloud out of nothing there would be no drought, so this is definitely an improvement on rain. Gene's Farm is just outside the cloud seating program's target area, but he wants in.

Can you prove that it helps or not? I don't know, but it's better than nothing, you can't just sit on your hands to

make

it rain more, you know, seats in the clouds are really the only thing there is. I brought some of those ideas here to our cafeteria, talking to the guys, some of the older farmers and there's some negativity there, but I definitely think we need to revisit that and it might be time for the water, the cloud seeding man, come in and give us a program here in the plains. Opposition to cloud seating is not new in New Mexico.

For example, some locals have expressed concerns about environmental security and financing, but farmers in the area would have to wait for the next rainy season to start seeing results during wet years. It's very important for us and it's easy to relax during the wet years, but it's very important for us to stay on our game and be aggressive during those wet seasons because that's when we accumulate our water to extra recharge our aquifer and thus have runoff into the lakes, rivers and reservoirs around the world. Droughts are increasing. The UN predicts that three-quarters of the world's population will be affected by drought by 2050.

In places like China, Europe, Australia, India, where droughts are already worsening, cloud seeding programs are in full swing as As cloud seeding gains ground, we'll learn more about what it means. what we can and cannot do for ourselves, but as we leave the sweltering heat of Texas I can't help but think that to truly lessen the damage caused by droughts we need to mitigate climate change, which means reducing emissions to control temperatures and protect our water. cycle as a whole foreign