Can This Army of Drones Solve the West’s Water Crisis? 

In late spring, Gus Buck, a recent college graduate and drone researcher, packed up a U-Haul and drove some 60 hours from his home in Salt Lake City to Alaska’s southern Kenai Peninsula. From a remote cabin that he equipped with radars, drones, and an abundance of caffeine and snacks, Buck and about a dozen other startup employees posted up for the summer to conduct one of the strangest experiments in American weather.

From early June to late August, Rainmaker—a hundred-million-dollar cloud seeding company—flew their quadcopters into the Alaskan sky, dispersing particles that they hoped would make the clouds burst. It was the continuation of years-long research they are carrying out across the country to search for the key data and tools they believe will one day help end the water crisis that has drained the American West.

After two years of trial and error—finding the wrong clouds, using the wrong-sized particles, and tweaking designs so ice-covered drones didn't fall from the sky—Rainmaker said it provably made snow in January. Since then, they say they produced 143 million gallons of water during operations run early this year and 19 million gallons of water over the course of three hours in Alaska this August.

Cloud seeding isn’t a new technology, but Rainmaker’s innovative approach coupled with the driest stretch parts of the West have seen in some 1,200 years has thrown the practice into renewed prominence—and under renewed scrutiny. It’s notoriously hard to quantify how effective the technique is, and scientists are skeptical of big promises from well-funded enterprises.

Still, as climate change warms the planet, decreasing snowpacks, draining reservoirs, and creating parched landscapes ripe for wildfires, parts of the United States and other countries are desperate for a remedy, pushing companies like Rainmaker to keep innovating.

“We don't have another solution,” says Katja Friedrich, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. “What else is solving our water crisis?”

Cloud seeding works by enhancing the natural process that causes precipitation. The clouds we see when we look up at the sky are made of billions of droplets that have formed after evaporating from rivers, lakes, and oceans. As these droplets condense, they become so heavy that they rain or snow down on us. Silver iodide, the most used seeding agent, attracts moisture. As droplets coalesce around one iodide particle, they become so heavy they fall.

This form of weather modification has been practiced since the 1940s, always with the caveat that it is hard to know how much to attribute precipitation to the seeding agents. But a little over 10 years ago, a team of scientists set out to prove causality. The result was SNOWIE, a 2017 experiment that for the first time confirmed that silver iodide does contribute to snowfall. One 24-minute run of seeding produced over 89 million gallons of water, enough to fill 135 Olympic swimming pools.

“We can produce snow and we can quantify it,” says Friedrich, one of the scientists behind the effort, “but really the amount is not as much as we hoped for.”

She says she sees promise in Rainmaker's "novel" drone-based seeding, but she's skeptical of the numbers they're publishing. Friedrich worries that “cloud seeding is being oversold because we have a water crisis.”

That hasn’t stopped people from doing it. Many Western states, Texas, and North Dakota cloud seed, as do China, India, and the United Arab Emirates. The most ideal time to try it is during the winter and in places that get snow. Precipitation in those conditions is more likely to alleviate drought because it forms snowpack and helps fill waterways in the spring. Moisture from rainfall, on the other hand, quickly evaporates.

Even modest increases in precipitation are enough to prompt drought-stricken regions to try cloud seeding. Idaho Power, which serves more than half a million people through mostly hydroelectric plants, cloud seeds from November to April, seeing an approximate average 10 percent increase in precipitation meant to help fill the reservoirs the company uses for hydropower. But the drought years that spark demand for the practice are also the worst years to seed, because there are less storms in the atmosphere to pull from, says Derek Blestrud, an atmospheric scientist at Idaho Power.

“We can only nudge mother nature,” he says.

That’s why Rainmker is aiming bigger.

It was founded in 2023 by Augustus Doricko, a 26-year-old college dropout who grew up in Connecticut, where there were rarely water issues. But during his first year studying physics at the University of California, Berkeley, students couldn’t go outside for a week as wildfires burned through the dry brush made worse by the state’s drought. “Seeing what the West was going through was eye-opening,” says Doricko.

The company distinguishes itself from other cloud seeding companies with their custom-designed quadcopter drones to release cloud seeding particles, maintaining precision while avoiding the dangers and inconveniences of flying planes into icy conditions. They have also built weather models and radars tailored to cloud seeding and plan to launch new seeding agents they say are more sustainable than silver iodide. A scientific review of cloud seeding by the Government Accountability Office didn’t find evidence that silver iodide used in current experiments results in negative health or environmental impacts, but it’s unclear if much larger scale operations may have any consequences.

As Rainmaker refines their cloud seeding technique, Doricko estimates they are on track to generate several billion more gallons of water this winter.

Yet despite early successes, cloud seeding still faces a long road before being considered a viable climate solution. Even operating on a larger scale, the technology will only make a small dent in the West’s water needs.

The average American uses over 80 gallons of water each day. The Great Salt Lake, whose water levels have shrunk by nearly three-quarters since the mid-nineteenth century, loses an average of 2.6 billion gallons daily to evaporation.

Cloud seeding skeptics also want to see more comprehensive results before considering how the technology might help alleviate drought conditions. Friedrich notes that the company hasn’t yet recorded how much of the precipitation they formed hit the ground, a gap Rainmaker also acknowledges.

“We know that that is a missing piece, and this year we’re actively working to deploy instruments to collect that data for us,” says Amie Abramyan, an atmospheric scientist and director of field research at Rainmaker.

Cloud seeding has also drawn suspicion from the public. When flooding in Kerr County, Texas, killed over 130 people last summer, online misinformation wrongly theorized Rainmaker’s operations two days earlier and 100 miles away caused the disaster.

Scientists say most concerns are rooted in a misunderstanding of the technology.“Anthropogenically, we have put many more particles in the atmosphere over the past fifty years,” says Roelof Bruintjes, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "If you drive your car, you are cloud seeding because the nitrogen oxides that come out of your exhaust, they turn into nitrate particles and those are ideal for droplets to form on.”

Flying a commercial airplane through a cloud is also a form of cloud seeding notes Friedrich; the force of airliners freeze the water particles, causing them to fall as ice.

Despite the pushback, Rainmaker is forging ahead with support from state water departments and private funders. The company announced Monday that it had raised $100 million in funding.

As Buck gears up for another seeding season back in Utah, he still thinks about one night in Alaska. It was around two o’clock in the morning, but everyone was awake. The meteorologists had pinpointed optimal conditions for seeding, and a team had driven off into the wilderness, their pickup truck packed with the company’s patented drones. As the drones flew through the sky, the group scanned the radar. Suddenly little hot spots began to emerge: Ice crystals were forming above them.

“There was a strong sense of jubilation when we saw the first signature,” says Buck, “like everything we had been working toward that summer had finally paid off.”