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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During a drought, there’s just not enough water in the air to seed clouds. Most of the time, cloud seeding is like wringing water out of a slightly damp sponge in that you’ll probably get some to drip out. During a drought, the air is much dryer, so it’s more like trying to wring water out of a sponge that’s dried out overnight.
Cloud seeding is a way to get water that’s in the air to fall on the ground right away. If there is no water in the air, it doesn’t work. We could spray water in the air, but that’s a lot of water.
right now, cloud seeding is still a new technology, and it’s effectiveness is debated. it also costs a lot of money since it requires a lot of plane hours to seed clouds. you also need clouds to seed them, it’s not possible to create clouds from no where. it only works in very specific situations and the amount of “extra” rain created is considered to be negligible.
Basically, that’s not how cloud seeding works. We need actual clouds with enough water to condense into rain. Without those clouds, there’s nothing to seed.
If we could, we would. Being able to make it rain anywhere we want, whenever we want would be like a holy grail achievement of science.
Cloud seeding has been attempted for 100 years or more, and there is still no scientific consensus on whether it works or not. A lot of scientists are of the opinion that cloud seeding produces negligible or no results.
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.
> It’s not like the water is disappearing from earth, **it’s just displacing in other parts of the world**
Well, there is one part of the problem (aside from the fact that cloud seeing still requires the right conditions to work).
Cloud seeding is already happening in the western US. At best it could provide a 10% lift in rainfall. It works, but it’s not a solution.
Source: had to research this for work
The “water cycle” we learned about in elementary school is very slow. It would need a climate changing increase in energy to get enough moisture into the right part of the atmosphere to increase continental rainfall enough to make a difference, and THAT would have significant unwanted effects.
You still need to get the water from somewhere. If you are having to bring water in from somewhere else, you might as well take it directly to where you need rather than spend a lot of effort to get it into the air, and hope that most of it falls back down where you need.
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