Is Mother Nature losing control?
Cloud seeding, according to an expert
Cloud seeding is a practice of weather modification used even outside of the field of atmospheric science, including by many ski resorts across the world.
Hey reader,
Today’s essay is Mountain Remote’s first journalistic deep-dive. I spoke with Joe Bustos, a scientist with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, about cloud seeding, a heady topic that involves spraying silver iodide into clouds in order to help them produce more precipitation.
While cloud seeding is not going to solve the west’s devastating drought — now the worst in 1,200 years — it is frequently used by ski resorts to kick their snow totals up a notch.
This story is an updated version of an article I originally reported for the January 2012 issue of Snowboard Colorado magazine. If you happen to come across a print copy at a library in Denver, snag it. I’m not sure where my copy went.
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Now, let’s get wet.
Is Mother Nature losing control?
Picture this: It’s puking snow outside. The cloud cover looks normal for a typical snowstorm. But the mountains — more accurately, specific parts of the mountains — are getting hammered.
You stand outside watching this phenomenon, already eyeing your lines for the next morning. That’s when you notice something odd. The roads look clear heading towards these mountains. It seems as though the storm is isolated over one area, and not really moving. An hour later and the same thing — it’s dumping on the mountain and clear everywhere else.
While this might seem like an act of god, it is actually just the hand of man messing with the physics of nature. The practice is called cloud seeding, and it’s been used since 1946 to trigger precipitation in specific areas.
Side note for the literature fans — Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was a renowned atmospheric scientist credited with discovering that silver iodide could be effectively used in cloud seeding. Quite the family, indeed.
Cloud seeding is a practice of weather modification used even outside of the field of atmospheric science, including by many ski resorts across the world. By pumping the clouds in a certain area full of silver iodide and solid carbon dioxide (dry ice), a cloud can be “supercooled,” thus causing ice particles to grow at rapid rates and become dense enough to fall from the cloud as precipation (in our case, snow).
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“Silver iodide once burned is hexagonal and has water-attracting and bonding properties and is therefore perfect for vapor to convert to snowflakes,” said Joe Busto, a scientist and researcher at the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
Joe is at the center of Colorado cloud seeding, keeping the peace and making sure it is credible and transparent for more confidence in the programs. Though the process uses naturally occurring substances, it tends to draw ire from strict environmentalists.
“Cloud Seeding is not the answer to any one problem, but is a little bit helpful each year,” Joe says.
Joe is in charge of issuing the permits that allow a person or group to legally seed clouds, as well as administering a grant program for winter cloud seeding operations. For everything from getting the low-down on which ski areas use cloud seeding, when they are allowed to seed clouds, and how they go about doing it, Joe is the man with the master plan.
Throughout its history cloud seeding has been a controversial subject. The perceived problem with cloud seeding, as a lot of naturalists see it, is that the process effectively “alters” the weather, causing a small percentage of extra precipitation in a designated area than would have otherwise occurred. There is also speculation that adding extra precipitation to one area then takes away precipiation in another.
Does cloud seeding work?
Credit: Denver Water. A cloud seeding gun shooting silver iodide into the air.
A lot of people also question whether or not cloud seeding actually works.
“From my perspective, not my agency’s, I believe cloud seeding is controversial because people either over or underestimate its effectiveness,” Joe says. “It is not the reason there is 12 feet in the back bowls of Vail nor is it the reason that the eastern plains of Colorado (have been) dry the last few years. They also don’t understand the science very well. It is basically the stimulation of natural processes by giving more particles for water vapor to bond to.”
In many cases, the everyday snowboarder won’t even notice that cloud seeding is taking place. “Well-designed and executed programs will make up about 10% more snow in your target area, that is all,” he says.
As noted above, Joe feels strongly that cloud seeding is a practical way to help generate more precipitation where needed, but is not the cure-all for droughts or other natural phenomena.
“You can’t cloud seed in a drought as you need the clouds with water vapor in them to work with,” he says. “Therin lies a problem -- you can work in an average year to make it a little better than average or a wet year to make it a more wet year but you can do very little for a drought. It should be considered a small snow and water resource augmentation program only.”
Another main concern with cloud seeding is how it affects the surrounding wildlife.
“Programs are monitored by the state and thresholds are set on snowpack to suspend operations based on the natural variability of the local climate,” says Joe.
Speculation has also surrounded whether or not the silver iodide that is pumped into the clouds is harmful to plants and animals.
During a study conducted in Australia and published in 2009 entitled An Assessment of the Environmental Toxicity of Silver Iodide, cloud seeding experiments were tested to determine the amount of silver iodide absorbed in water, snow, plants and animals.
The research project was titled the “Snowy Precipitation Enhancement Research Project.”
To pull from the report: “Mean silver concentrations have all been shown to be well below the GTV for all matrices, at all locations and for periods of sampling during the SPERP,” Williams and Denholm, pg. 17.
The study also concluded that silver iodide is not harmful to living creatures, as some other forms of silver can be. “Insoluble or complexed silver compounds were found to be much less toxic or essentially non-toxic to a range of terrestrial and aquatic vertebrates,” Williams and Denholm, pg. 2.
“As far as negative impacts from the use of silver iodide there aren’t any documented impacts to date,” Joe says. “It is basically inert and bonds with water but is used in very small quantities and doesn’t bioaccumulate in plants, animals, or fish.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the extra snow can’t endanger wildlife, however. “In 2008 snowpack was well over 160% in late January and the DOW was doing hay drops to feed deer because there was so much mid-elevation snow where there normally would not be as much snow,” Joe says.
Not all ski resorts in Colorado practice cloud seeding or have anything to do with it, but many of the major resorts are a part of some kind of cloud seeding program, including Winter Park, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin, Breckenridge, Vail, Beaver Creek, Powder Horn, Telluride, and Purgatory.
“It is a way to help with powder in areas you can’t reach with snow guns,” says Joe. “The primary goals of Vail and Winter Park are to target cloud seeding for the back bowls where their Forest Service permits do not allow for snowmaking equipment.”
Winter Park confirmed this.
“It is all about snowpack augmentation,” says Doug Laraby, Director of Mountain Planning at Winter Park Resort. “We’ve got two remote generators, and they are up HIGH. We can take advantage of the conditions to augment our snowpack.”
The remote generators are operated from Nevada under close supervision.
Ski areas aren’t the only places that are down with the extra wet cloud. Several water districts across the state pitch in with funding as well, bringing the total to around 40 entities that participate, according to Joe.
Because cloud seeding programs are under strict watch, the plug can be pulled if the snowpack becomes too much of a problem. “This criteria or thresholds works pretty well as we suspended the programs in the Gunnison for the rest of the year that year. It was a joint decision between the CWCB, County, and contractor. But it was the right decision,” Joe says.
A cloud near that I suspect was seeded made this drive on Interstate 70 near Loveland Ski Area rather miserable.
How can a ski area start seeding clouds?
At this point, we have a basic idea of what cloud seeding does and why people may be for or against it. So now let’s go over how it works and what it takes to get started.
Before getting started with a cloud seeding program, a ski area must get a permit. The state has a permitting program that ensures each cloud seeding operation is run by people who know what they are doing and that liability insurance is carried in case of a lawsuit.
“No lawsuits have been ever paid out but its best to ensure that project sponsors are covered for this activity,” says Joe.
So what does it take to get a permit?
“You have to advertise in the papers, submit an application to the state, and defend and present the details of your application at a public hearing,” says Joe.
The public also has the opportunity to express concern before a permit is granted.
“The state believes you should give the public proper notice and an opportunity to be heard. The state uses that information and develops a record of decision to approve, deny, or approve with special terms and conditions. It is not a forum to vote programs up or down but legitimate concerns should be addressed.”
North American Weather Consultants from Utah and Western Weather Consultants in Durango are the two main places to go through to get started. The Winter Park Ski Area and Denver Water went through WWC and paid $107,000 to use ten generators for three months.
“I have been partnering with Winter Park to have the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada operate two specialized high output high elevation cloud seeding machines and they are about $60,000 for five months for two of them,” says Joe. “We really focused on getting those machines at about 9500 and 8900 feet elevation on Denver Water and USFS land to ensure our seeding solution was regularly getting in cloud.”
The actual process of cloud seeding is quicker than you might think, as long as the generators are in the right spot.
“Generators can be 5-20 miles upwind of the target area and depending on winds it could be 10 – 30 minutes before this starts to take effect,” says Joe.
“Not all storms can be seeded,” Joe says. “You must keep in mind that silver iodide, the solution used in cloud seeding, is only active at certain thresholds so storms can be too warm, too dry, too cold to use the chemicals.”
Cutting in here to note that the following is a full-on infodump from Joe Bustos.
“Opponents of cloud seeding regularly site the robbing Peter to pay Paul argument or that winter seeding in our mountains is to the detriment of our plains. In that argument we ignore the massive mountain barrier in our state and the orographic lift of our terrain,” Joe says.
“Simply put the mountains force cold air to rise and cool and this increases the effectiveness of precipitations processes in the winter in our mountains. Similarly air will warm and descend on the downwind side of mountain ranges and that is a natural phenomena as well known as rain shadow seen all over the world. It is always drier downwind of mountains as you are tucked in behind a barrier for the storm systems. Studies and data haven’t shown that seeding in one area is to the detriment of another area.
“You need to be on the upwind side of the mountains in order to use winds to ramp your seeding material up into the clouds that is why most of our generators are on the western slope or spine of the Rockies as most winter weather tracks of the northwest, west, and southwest. We are working within the conceptual model of cloud seeding and using the terrain we have. We have the best terrain in the country for ground based seeding and eight major watersheds so it makes sense to cloud seed the upper reaches of a watershed to the benefit the water resources of the whole watershed. ”
Data from 2000 through 2011
The Colorado Water Conservation Board has put over $1 million into locally sponsored cloud seeding programs in Colorado since 2004, according to Joe. What is more interesting is that other states that depend heavily on water from here in CO have been throwing down the dollars as well.
“Since 2007 downstream water users Southern Nevada Water Authority, Central Arizona Water Conservation District, and the California Six Agency Committee have put $1M towards Colorado cloud seeding,” says Joe.
“In the Colorado River Basin, we have agreed to collaborate on this science to help meet our water needs. I try and balance it as grants to existing programs, modernizing existing programs with new equipment, and importing and deploying new equipment to do good evaluations. You can’t run models or do simulations without good inputs so I am at square one collecting good data,” Joe says.
From many points, the issue with cloud seeding doesn’t have so much to do with the ski industry in Colorado, but with everyone that uses water that comes from Colorado. While Joe is an avid snowboarder, he and everyone at the CWCB have to also make sure that the water that needs to get to Nevada, Arizona, and California is actually getting there.
“Few people realize our compact obligations and look a stream and say 25% of that water is ours and the rest goes downstream. We see that at my agency we have to. It is tighter than people think and water resources will struggle to keep up with population growth in Colorado and the southwestern U.S.,” he says.
The least that we can hope for is that the people who are making the extra snow that we ride on every day are doing a good job and being environmentally responsible. “We don’t want to get in a position where we are seeding and hoping we are doing a good job.
Those questions can be answered by good science that involves plume modeling, airflow measurements, high-resolution precipitation gauges, silver in snow analysis, weather stations with icing sensors that catalog data. Contractors don’t like those ideas as they take money out of their pockets but we must insist on them for the long-term viability of the field,” Joe says.
“The focus of my agenci’s effort has been to ensure programs are well conducted, executed and evaluated. It is safe to safe say climate change predictions, population growth in the west and fierce competition for water that cloud seeding done properly will earns its rightful place in the portfolio of tools needed now in and in the future.”
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