I’ve heard of the term cloud seeding. Why can’t we create rain clouds and position them in the parts of the US that are going through droughts? It’s not like the water is disappearing from earth, it’s just displacing in other parts of the world
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Cloud seeding requires the clouds to exist in the first place and prevents the clouds from dumping water wherever they normally would have.
The issue that California is having right now is that clouds form in the Pacific Ocean and then follow the Pacific Jet Stream. Ocean temperatures are colder than normal off the California coast. That results in both less rain and the Jet Stream moving north into Washington and Canada. (So you get less clouds, and the clouds that do form go North and miss California.)
This is not unusual for California – the Pacific Ocean periodically cycles through warm and cold periods, which produce periods of tremendous rain, followed by drought, each lasting a few years. California historically dealt with this by heavily investing in water infrastructure, such as dams, that allowed it to store excess water in wet years. California more or less stopped investing in water infrastructure in the mid 90’s and the state’s growth has finally outpaced the existing infrastructure’s ability to cope.
California can’t just create clouds because the water has to come from somewhere. In rain heavy years, Northern California will get somewhere around 80 inches of rain. That means that enough water will fall on Northern California to cover an area the size of New York and Pennsylvania in 7 feet of water. That is a tremendous amount of water and the only source for it is the ocean.
Northern California remains one of the wettest places on Earth, on average. But for the state to function it needs to be able to store enough of that water, which it currently can’t do due to a lack of investment in/approval for major water management projects.
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