Driving in northern Nevada, Frank McDonough is checking on cloud seeding sites.
But he said the sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s aren’t ideal.
“We cannot seed in these temperatures,” he said. “We need widespread, low clouds to be present for us to do cloud seeding.”
Essentially, cloud seeding works by introducing specific types of particles into clouds, which essentially supercharges the cloud to produce precipitation–snow in higher elevations and rain in lower areas.
McDonough leads the cloud seeding division at the nonprofit Desert Research Institute, which operates a half dozen ground-based cloud seeding sites across Nevada.
“What you’re trying to do is create these small ice crystals inside of a cloud that’s full of sub-freezing liquid water drops,” McDonough explains.
Cloud seeding has been around for decades. And what scientists have learned has advanced significantly.
About an hour outside Las Vegas, we meet another DRI team using these sunny, non-operational days to test the equipment.
At first glance their rustic set up looks like a trailer on wheels with a solar panel, and a tower topped with an upside-down looking barrel. But it’s deceptively scientific.
Field technician Patrick Malarkey opens the trailer, takes a laptop and with a few clicks fires up the generator. You immediately hear and see the propane fire up.
“We make a flame with a propane burner, and then we spray, we atomize, the solution of silver iodide and acetone and spray it into the flame,” Malarkey said.
“And so, the silver iodide structure, the molecular structure, the lattice structure, is similar to how water forms ice, and so when the water droplets touch it, it's easy for the water molecules to say, oh, I can turn into ice now,” Melarkey explained.
In other words, that process triggers clouds to release more water in lower elevations where it is needed. It’s a tool that can help communities and farmers make it through dry seasons and combat drought.
“It's really the only method there is to increase the amount of water in a watershed,” McDonough explained. “And it's done for less than $10 per acre foot. And an acre foot is enough water for about three houses’ yearly use. So if a cloud seeding program can put down 50,000 acre feet in a course of a winter, and that's approximately what the Nevada state program puts down, that's enough water for 150,000 houses’ use, for a year.”
That’s why there’s been a dramatic increase in investment in cloud seeding across the Mountain West. Three years ago, the Nevada legislature three years ago allocated about $600,000to support DRI’s efforts. Surrounding states have invested even more. Utah recently allocated $16 million for cloud seeding. And the federal Bureau of Reclamation provided a nearly $2.5 million grant for cloud seeding operations in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming aimed at increasing the levels in Lake Mead, which is fed primarily by the Colorado River.
“There are over 1,000 reports in NOAA’s) database,” explained Karen Howard, director of science and technology assessment at the Government Accountability Office.
The GAO is Congress’ own governmental watchdog. The agency’s database tracks a rising number of cloud seeding and other weather modification projects.
“We did a review of those, and we found that the vast majority of them had missing information, incorrect information,” she said.
The database has been maintained for decades by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which recently faced steep budget cuts. The GAO also found that NOAA is not fully meeting its responsibilities to collect data and adequately maintain its reports.
NOAA’s weather modification reporting website states that any person or company in the U.S. needs to report cloud seeding to NOAA activities. The Weather Modification Reporting act of 1972 governs this provision and says anyone conducting weather modification activities – including cloud seeding – has to report those activities to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce within 10 days before or 10 days after starting these projects.
Howard and her team met with state-funded operations and private companies that reported to NOAA.
“And then, through correlating with state databases and other sources, we also found a lot of reports were missing that should have been in there,” she said. “So, we found major problems with the database.”
This means the public likely isn’t being informed about all the small – and large – weather modification operations in motion across our region, creating a lack of transparency.
The Mountain West News Bureau reached out to NOAA several times and never received a response. The GAO recommended, in its 2026 report, that NOAA improve its reporting and tracking processes to “ensure reliable information.” Some of its recommendations include asking NOAA to improve instructions on how to complete the reporting across different activities and making clear to operators and state and local agencies its role in weather modification oversight.
Howard said data collection is important as technology improves and cloud seeding evolves.
“The better we can do at reporting what activities are occurring and doing good, reliable scientific measurements, having more rain gauges out there collecting, having better targeted maps showing where cloud seeding is occurring, the more we're going to understand how effective it is and have the confidence that we're getting the bang for the buck that's being invested,” said Howard.
In other words, better tracking can also help address emerging questions, such as whether human-caused pollution makes cloud seeding less effective.
McDonough explained that air pollution could cause clouds to be less efficient at producing precipitation.
“So, places where there's lots of pollution tend to have clouds with smaller droplets,“ he said. “And these droplets are less likely to be able to produce ice. And we're seeing decreased precipitation downwind of urban areas.”
These Desert Research Institute scientists say some private companies have more elaborate set-ups than they do. Those companies are doing cloud seeding with planes, affecting wider areas.
McDonough said one day that drones could be an affordable way for more organizations to get into the regional weather modification game. But he also says it’s important to keep any new discoveries in perspective.
“It’s not going to solve the drought problem,” McDonough said. “It’s just sort of another tool in the toolbox. So, if you add in conservation, cloud seeding and land use, you could potentially help people manage a limited supply of water.”
On the horizon are newer approaches, including what’s called solar geoengineering– which is a similar concept to cloud seeding but takes place high into the atmosphere.
Howard explained: “This is a way of mimicking, for example when a volcano erupts and the dust goes way high into the atmosphere and gets caught up there and travels around the earth and can really cool the earth for a period of time. They’re trying to mimic that process.”
That raises a number of other questions for the future of weather modification - questions that will be better answered with comprehensive data and a new and improved system for NOAA to provide the public and cloud seeders looking to extract every drop of water possible.
