A cloud-seeding company claims it added 2 billion gallons of water in Utah. Experts have their doubts.

Kevin Clyde’s mind is always in the clouds. As a water district board member in southeastern Utah, he’s constantly checking a patch of sky near the La Sal Mountains. He swears he’s seen more wisps of white near a new cloud seeding station in the area — one that, he hopes, has prompted more rain and snow in his region.

“It may be just wishful thinking, but it looks to me like it’s working,” said Clyde, who serves on the board of the Grand County Water Conservancy District based in Moab. 

Proving that, however, is another issue entirely.

The Utah district has reservoirs that shrink in record-dry years like 2026 and limited underground aquifers. Water managers, like Clyde, are trying to ensure the supply lasts for decades into the future. That is, in part, why the district agreed to launch one of two new ground-based cloud seeding stations. 

These stations aim to increase rain and snow by shooting charged ions into the sky, as opposed to the better-known method of shooting chemicals out of a plane. It’s a new approach to cloud seeding, aka weather modification, which dates back to the early 1900s and manipulates clouds to drop more precipitation.

Rain Enhancement Technologies, the Florida-based company behind the newfangled ion-spewing stations, claims it generated 8,750 acre-feet of additional snow last winter. Its other pilot station, located near Gill in Weld County, hasn’t released data yet.

That’s over 2.8 billion gallons of water, or the annual water use of up to 35,000 households. For states like Colorado and Utah, any new water is a boon. Decades of drought have sent communities across the West scrambling to conserve water and bulk up supplies.

“We’d love to see thousands of these all over helping to solve the water crisis,” Randy Seidl, CEO of Rain Enhancement Technologies, said.

Colorado has had its own weather modification program since the 1970s, when it launched its first project with Vail Resorts. Most of the ground-based stations permitted by the state use a chemical called silver iodide to trigger rainfall, except Rain Enhancement Technologies’ new station in Weld County.

Many of the silver-iodide programs reported successfully adding between 67,300 and 115,000 acre-feet of water to Colorado’s watersheds each winter, according to annual reports between 2023 and 2026.

What’s the cost of running the projects? Between 58 cents and $4.89 per new acre-foot of water, roughly the price of a gumball or cup of coffee.

The ion station is promising, said Andrew Rickert, manager for Colorado’s weather modification program at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. These stations, called weather enhancement technology arrays, or WETAs, can run year-round, unlike flight-dependent cloud seeding. And they can operate in warmer temperatures than the silver iodide method, he said.

There is research indicating it works with rain, but Rickert wants to know more about how it works, especially with snow. 

“I’ve kind of been waiting till we have a little bit more data on the WETA technologies before I more aggressively pursue deploying it in Colorado,” he said.

But the ion stations have also sparked skepticism from some researchers, who say industry is too far ahead of the science. And it raises the question of whether unproven technologies are raising false hope for communities frantic for water, said Katja Friedrich, a cloud microphysicist at the University of Colorado.

“We don’t have the answers,” said Friedrich, department chair and professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. “And I feel like this is so far ahead because we’re so desperate for water that we’ll do anything.”

The science of making rain

People have been trying different ways to seed clouds for over a century. 

The science goes like this: Clouds hold tiny particles of dust or salt and water vapor, some of which is still liquid even at below-freezing temperatures. This supercooled water is unstable and can easily tip into its frozen state.

Burning a chemical, silver iodide, and sending it into clouds causes particles to collide with the supercooled liquid, turn it into ice, and then gather more water vapor and more weight as it falls through the cloud, Friedrich said.

Scientists have been trying to make this happen in nature for over a century to help agriculture, relieve drought, help ski resorts and essentially drop rain where humans want it to go. But there’s no guarantee that a cloud seeding attempt will lead to more precipitation. 

In 1915, the city of San Diego hired someone to burn a chemical mixture from the top of a 20-foot tower to create rain, according to an academic article published in February in the journal, Climate. In the 1940s, General Electric Co. shot dry ice out of planes and into clouds to produce ice and snow.

It was so popular in the 1960s that the federal government was discussing a national weather modification program. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitors projects but doesn’t do its own cloud seeding.)

For decades, laboratory research has shown that the silver iodide method works. But proving the laboratory science works in nature has been challenging. Disagreements among scientists cast doubt on whether it worked as advertised and funding opportunities dwindled, Friedrich said. 

(There are also plenty of conspiracy theories about what is getting dropped out of the air and some states, like Florida and Tennessee, have even passed legislation banning cloud seeding.)

In 2019, Friedrich was part of a research team that used radar to track planes as they burned and sprayed silver iodide out of what looked like flaming cannons. Their research was groundbreaking, providing scientific evidence that cloud seeding with planes and silver iodide actually worked.

Interest has been on the rise, especially in Western states like those in the overstressed Colorado River Basin. 

The number of project reports filed to NOAA shot up around 2019, according to the Climate article. Even internet searches for cloud seeding and weather modification increased dramatically starting in 2023.

Now companies, like Rainmaker Technology Corporation founded in 2023, are using drones to drop silver iodide in clouds. Some are trying to seed fast-moving cumulus clouds to increase rain in the summer and others want to modify thunderstorms to prevent large hail — a controversial idea without the science to back it up, Friedrich said. 

“The problem really with cloud seeding is that the physics works. In a lab, it does work,” she said. “It’s just really complicated in nature because you need to get the material at the right time in the right place.”

Hucksters or scientists?

In Grand County, Clyde needs a few things to sleep easier: water, data and money.

Storms are normally uplifted and slowed by the La Sal Mountains. The amount of water that falls on the county has been near normal — it just comes in four or five days each year, often with flash floods, he said. And many residents live near creeks and in flood zones. 

Plus, the county depends on a radar based in Grand Junction, so its local weather forecasts aren’t always accurate. 

“It comes in a big gully buster and it all runs off,” he said. “It doesn’t sink into the ground, so our soil moisture in the mountains is really quite low.”

The district catches water in underground aquifers, but those come with their own limits and variations in water quality. One district reservoir is at a third of its capacity, leaving farmers with 50% of their normal water supplies, Clyde said. Its drinking water supplies are also under pressure, especially in dry years.

But the district also has room to expand, in part, by using untapped water rights in the Colorado River and an upstream reservoir, Flaming Gorge. If the county’s 2% growth rate holds steady, he added, they have enough water for the next 60 years of growth. 

The district is trying different solutions: It is planning to access its Colorado River water rights this year to help replenish its water storage. It is also pushing conservation techniques, like watering lawns at night. 

And it is pursuing ways to add to its supply, like teaming up with new cloud seeding companies.

“I’m trying to look out to the future for this valley far after my presence here,” Grand County Commissioner Bill Winfield said. “These are long-term plans to try and make sure that our kids and our grandkids have a future in this valley.”

But Clyde and Winfield aren’t fully confident in the new charged-ion station’s data. 

The 8,750 acre-feet of new water was an estimate based on data from two weather gauges, one located in the La Sal Mountains and one located in the Abajo Mountains about 50 miles away. Even Rain Enhancement Technologies says the figure has 80% to 85% certainty.

“People have heard about cloud seeding … for a long time and not very many people believe in it,” Clyde said. “It’s kind of like witch doctoring.”

Solutions or false hope?

Water officials say they need more data to know whether they should use public money on the new technologies and more funding to continue the pilot study so they can get that data. Then they could weigh the merits of buying an ion-generating station, which costs $750,000 and lasts about 15 years.

They’re in the process of improving that data. The district has rain gauges on the way, ready to be set up in September, Clyde and Winfield said.

Friedrich, the CU cloud scientist, says there are significant, unanswered questions about the Rain Enhancement Technology system. Do the ions reach the cloud or spread horizontally? Are the particles still ionized when they get to the cloud, and if so, can it be proven they’re actually causing condensation and precipitation? And does that rain or snow actually reach the ground? 

“I have more questions about this than I have answers,” she said. “They’re raising money. They’re putting these things up. I think they’re creating really false hope that this is working.”

Additional research could be hard to come by. The Trump administration has a controversial proposal to change how grants are awarded and is prioritizing research focused on subjects like artificial intelligence and quantum information science. Weather modification doesn’t quite fit the prompts, Friedrich said.

She added that most of her funding comes from the National Science Foundation, which is stuck in the middle of the debate and remains on hold. 

Rain Enhancement Technologies claims the science is solid, pointing to its independently reviewed work, a recent study based in Oman and research into the ion method over the past 50 years. The record points to cautious optimism, not false hope, the company said. 

Conservation is important, CEO Seidl said, but “there’s going to be a huge problem unless the world starts focusing on creating more (water).” 

For Rickert in Colorado, it’s worth trying. That’s why the state offered funding for a trial in Weld County.

“People are like, why are you funding this if you’re not sure it works?” he said. “But you got to start somewhere. You need to start collecting data at some point and seeing if stuff works.”