Commuters make their well beyond India Gate amid smoggy circumstances in New Delhi, India, on October 29, 2025.
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International locations throughout the globe are more and more turning to a decades-old climate modification approach as a part of a push to regulate when and the place it rains.
Alongside the U.S. and China, which boasts the world’s largest climate modification program, France, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia are amongst a rising listing of nations to have experimented with cloud seeding.
For a lot of, the embrace of rain-making operations stems from the necessity to increase water provides as international demand continues to rise amid the local weather disaster.
Others have sought to make use of cloud seeding to disperse fog at airports, sort out air air pollution, cut back hail harm and even to control the climate for main occasions, such because the 2008 Summer season Olympics in Beijing.
Cloud seeding goals to enhance a cloud’s capacity to provide rain or snow by introducing tiny particles, normally silver iodide. The method is proscribed each in space and period and, over time, is estimated to extend native precipitation by 5% to fifteen%.
The idea shouldn’t be with out controversy, nevertheless. Since first going down within the Forties, cloud seeding experiments have raised concern over potential environmental and ecological dangers and stoked regional safety tensions, with nations accusing one another of stealing rain.
Augustus Doricko, CEO of Rainmaker, a California-based cloud seeding firm, stated there are two dynamics at play that appear to be rekindling folks’s curiosity within the know-how — each within the U.S. and the world over.
“One is actually simply circumstance, lots of these nations and areas are affected by extra volatility in local weather and precipitation patterns and their water provide, and so it is main them by means of necessity to be extra inventive than they have been up to now,” Doricko instructed CNBC by phone.
“Two, and I believe that is like the actual meat and potatoes of why Rainmaker acquired began, it is as a result of in the previous few years there have been some elementary breakthroughs in the right way to do measurements and attribution of cloud seeding results.”
Regardless of an 80-year legacy, Doricko stated curiosity in cloud seeding “actually fell off” within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties as a result of it had been tough to precisely measure how a lot precipitation derived from cloud seeding deployments.
Current technological enhancements now make it attainable to confirm the success of those deployments in actual time, Doricko stated.
The corporate, which says it intends to arrest the aridification of the American West, has grown quickly in latest months, from simply 19 workers at first of 2025 to 120 in the present day, a pattern that seems to underscore the booming curiosity in cloud seeding.
But, regardless of its identify, Doricko stated the corporate’s cloud seeding tasks are principally designed to make it snow.
“I misnamed the corporate it seems, and ‘Snowmaker’ most likely would have been extra apt. It does not sound nearly as good for what it is price,” Doricko stated.
He added: “I believe that crucial factor for Rainmaker to do that season is simply to make unambiguous proof of artifical snow — and do it so typically that it’s undeniably a viable and scalable know-how.”
Different U.S.-based cloud seeding firms embody Climate Modification Inc. in North Dakota and North American Climate Consultants in Utah, though some U.S. states, akin to Florida and Tennessee, have banned climate modification actions.
‘A viable water supply’
There are two key causes for why extra nations are embracing cloud seeding operations, based on Frank McDonough, a analysis scientist on the Nevada-based Desert Analysis Institute (DRI).
Firstly, the scientific analysis and validation efforts which were performed on cloud seeding tasks around the globe over the previous a number of a long time “have supplied sufficient information and cost-benefit evaluation for stakeholders to make use of this software with confidence,” McDonough instructed CNBC by e-mail.
By way of state-level assist, China has reportedly backed its climate modification program with $2 billion between 2014 and 2021, whereas Saudi Arabia spent $256 million in 2022 to assist the primary yr of its regional cloud seeding program.
Blended outcomes
Authorities in Iran reportedly sprayed clouds with chemical substances over the Urmia lake basin late final yr, in search of to spice up rainfall to fight the nation’s worst drought in a long time.
Such tasks should not at all times profitable, nevertheless. Along with the Delhi authorities, a staff on the Indian Institute of Know-how (IIT) Kanpur lately reported blended outcomes following a cloud seeding trial to sort out air air pollution in India’s capital metropolis.
The IIT stated in an announcement on the time that its try was “not fully profitable” as a result of an absence of moisture within the air, earlier than including that there had been a measurable discount in particulate matter following the experiment.
Folks watch as an airplane flies throughout an operation of cloud seeding at Adi Soemarmo air pressure base in Boyolali, Central Java, Indonesia, Feb. 24, 2023.
Xinhua Information Company | Xinhua Information Company | Getty Photographs
Diana Francis, head of the Environmental and Geophysical Sciences lab at Khalifa College in Abu Dhabi, stated cloud seeding can “modestly improve” precipitation in the proper circumstances.
“However it’s incremental, not transformative, and works finest as a part of a broader water and air-quality technique,” Francis instructed CNBC by e-mail.
Cloud seeding operations would possibly sometimes price between $1 to $10 per hectare-meter of extra water, Francis stated, noting that whereas this stays extremely variable, it really works out to be less expensive than desalination.
There are additionally different key caveats to contemplate, akin to a powerful dependence on cloud microphysics (given cloud seeding solely works on current clouds), issues with attribution and potential geopolitical and authorized points relating to downwind impacts, Francis stated.
Research have proven no vital affect on both human well being or the surroundings from earlier silver iodide cloud seeding tasks, based on the World Meteorological Group, whereas additional investigation is required to evaluate downwind results.
The U.N. climate company has additionally acknowledged that vital challenges in public, social and native acceptance of rain-making operations stay extensively evident.
