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Dirt Road Discussions
We are all about agriculture all the time. This podcast will surprise you! It is not your ordinary farm podcast. These are fascinating stories, from technology to human interest, where we talk to captivating people who are changing the landscape of the world around us. Hosted by the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation.
Dirt Road Discussions
Cloud Seeding: Nudging Mother Nature
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Civilization needs rain and snow. Did you know there is a scientific process to help this along? Whether you water your lawn, grow crops, or run a ski resort, we all depend on precipitation for our daily lives. Shaun Parkinson, Meteorology & Cloud Seeding Leader, and Derek Blestrud, Senior Atmospheric Scientist, from Idaho Power dive into the strategies, successes, and limitations of cloud seeding.
I think we've got a very interesting topic coming out. Yes, I am probably excited to do it.
SPEAKER_02Good to hear. Yeah, I think we've got a really good scale today. So off as we take another trip here down the dirt road, there's a good chance we're going to encounter some weather. So off, did you bring your umbrella like that?
SPEAKER_01And I've got a raincoat on right now, Cameron.
SPEAKER_02Perfect. You uh you should be set in the weather, as I mentioned, is today's uh the topic of today's episode and more specifically cloud speeding. So before we jump into that off, I heard a rumor. This one that's been going around the office. I I heard a rumor that you were once considering meteorology for a career and that you want to be a uh a weatherman on the news. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01Uh that is a uh not a true rumor, I guess, but that could very well have been a rumor that's going around.
SPEAKER_02Well, I would have to check my sources then. But you know, it sounds like it wouldn't be too bad of a career, right? Because you don't have to be correct all the time and you still collect it.
SPEAKER_01It is.
SPEAKER_02For our listeners, I have a question. So have you ever wondered about what cloud feeding is and how it all works? And we are lucky to be joined by some experts who can help kind of demystify. Ah, demystify.
SPEAKER_01I like it. Okay, I've already fit in here camera.
SPEAKER_02Good, good. Demystify cloud feeding for us. And we are lucky to have John Parkinson, the meteorology and cloud feeding leader. And Derek Fletchproof, a senior atmospheric scientist from Idaho Power. Um, and Odd, I guess I could have just simply introduced them as people who are smarter than us. So, John, Derek, thanks so much for joining us on Virtual Discussions. How are you today?
SPEAKER_03I'm doing well, and I'm glad to find out that I don't have to be right all the time. So I'm going to tell my boss that one gets off the past.
SPEAKER_00We'll see how that works for you.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. So, Derek and Sean, would you mind just starting off the podcast by telling us a little bit about yourselves and your background on what you do for Idaho Power?
SPEAKER_00Sure. This is Sean. Um so I started with Idaho Power back in 1990. I was working in water resources and we received uh a question, the group that I worked in at the time, we received a question about cloud seeding, what it is, and should Idaho Power Company be doing it? Because utilities in California were using cloud seeding to augment water supplies so that they would better fuel their hydropower system. And at that time in southern Idaho, we were in the midst of a pretty severe drought, and water supplies were of extensive concern. I kicked off a research effort on my part, and that spanned several years, and about a decade later, we were doing cloud seeding at Idaho Power Company.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, this is uh Derek. Um, I guess I got my start in weather on a on the farm back in North Dakota. I just loved watching weather as it rolled across the prairie. And uh from that, once I graduated from college, then I got into cloud seeding, and that brought me around the world until it landed me here at Ido Power about 14 years ago. Since then, it's been a good time growing the project and learning more about how cloud seeding works within a utility and then expanding that out, how it works within everybody else that uses water across water basins.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's really neat. I I'm excited to learn more about it. I think I'm gonna ask the first dumb question that we're gonna get so far in the podcast. Uh, can you guys describe cloud seeding to uh you know, freshman and high school level?
SPEAKER_03Well, I'll take a stab at that. Um, cloud seeding is basically what you're doing is Mother Nature is very inefficient at getting water that's in the atmosphere and getting it on the ground as precipitation. Cloud seeding comes along and it just helps Mother Nature out a little bit. So it coaxes a little bit more precipitation out of the atmosphere than what would occur naturally. If you look at a natural cloud that comes across and you know it drops snow over the mountains, there's each one of those snowflakes forms off of an impurity that's in the atmosphere. And that could be an an aerosol, a pluton that's there, a dust particle, a salt particle. It could be basically anything that's in the atmosphere. It also could be another ice crystal that's there that has broke off and could start another another snowflake. There's not a lot of these little particles that are in the atmosphere. So what cloud seeding does is we introduce more of these particles that aren't there naturally, but we introduce them, and that helps to coax a little bit more precipitation out of the cloud than what goes on naturally.
SPEAKER_01Let me let me go into this a little further. So you're saying within every snowflake, there's a little tiny particle of something that's not water?
SPEAKER_03That's how they begin. Um, you can have a snowflake, and if you think of the dendrite snowflake, the one that you drew as a kid, it has all those tentacles that come off. There's all these fragile parts to it. Those are little ice crystals that are there, those break off. And so if you have a little portion of those that break off, that could be the center. So that could be a full, full water droplet that starts ice crystal that starts another snowflake. But the original snowflakes that began, the first ones in the cloud, they need some sort of impurity that's there. That is oftentimes uh a salt particle or a dust particle or any pollutant that's in the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_02Derek, I'm just kind of curious as to more of about the history of cloud seeding. I don't have the type of brain that would think, you know what, I want to try and create some more rain, maybe, or just enhance the rain that we get. Can you touch more on the history of it and kind of where it started and where we're at now with it, if you don't mind?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no problem. Um, Sean might chime in on this a little bit too, but what started back in the 50s, uh, General Electric, there's a couple of scientists that were working on some different things, and they came across that if they drop dry ice into a cloud that's super cooled. So, super cooled is one of my favorite terms in meteorology. It means that you can take a liquid water particle that's in the atmosphere, that's in a clean environment, and you can reduce the temperature of that water droplet below freezing, and it actually stays in a liquid state. It doesn't freeze into an iceberg. And so what you have is a cloud is a whole bunch of super cool liquid water that's there. And if you ever go on YouTube, just check out um super cool liquid water experiment, you'll see people with water bottles that have them super cool and they'll tap them and the whole water bottle freezes. Um, it's a kind of a cool experiment that you can do. But these this happens in the atmosphere in a clean in a clean environment. And so when they dropped some dry ice into the cloud, they are into a chamber, it was a test chamber, they saw that super cool liquid water would freeze. And that happened because the dry ice was so cold when it fell through the cloud that it instantaneously froze those those water droplets. And from there, a few days later, they they are I'm not sure how long it was, it wasn't long afterwards that they realized that silver iodide, which is the ingredient that we use that the little particle that we put in the atmosphere on a molecular scale that's hexagonal in shape, so it mimics an ice crystal. And so they dropped that into the cloud chamber that they had, and the same thing happened. And so that's kind of where cloud seeding took off from. Originally, there was a lot of snake oil salesmen that came across when they started doing some experiments, they would go and say, hey, we're just gonna, you know, cause lots of rain in these basins and fill up reservoirs and stuff. And so after that, the people started making claims that cloud seeding of stuff that cloud seeding couldn't do. Um, but through the time, you know, through the 80s and the 90s, and now here in the 2000s, we've had a lot more research. And so we've we've kind of narrowed down to what cloud seeding can do, and and it really is a tool that we can use to you know nudge mother nature. We can have a little bit more precipitation than that fall than what would fall naturally. And we're looking at about a 10% increase in precipitation. So it's not a lot, but that 10% is uh is a tool that we have in the water management tools that we use. So it's a little bit more than what would happen naturally. It comes down a little bit later because it's the last snow that comes off if you have a bigger snow snowpack. And so this is really valuable water that comes down and it helps to get the runoff season to extend a little bit longer than what would happen naturally. This is good for hydropower, it's good for irrigation, it's good for you know fish, it's good for um animals and everything else. So it's just uh it's just a tool that we have to uh get a little bit more water than what happens naturally.
SPEAKER_01Man, there's about 12 different ways I want to take this conversation. But I guess one of the things that that I'd like to know is are you cloud seeding all year round or are you doing it, you know, uh mostly as the the last snowfall?
SPEAKER_03Uh we we cloud seed in Idaho, we and in most of the western states in the United States, we do what's called wintertime uh cloud seeding, and we use mountains and we use the orographic lift, so the the terrain and um lift that that occurs in the atmosphere from mountain ranges, and we coax a little bit more precipitations in the high elevation of the mountains. So this happens in the wintertime. Um our project here at Idle Power, we run from the first of November through the end of March. We'll extend it into April and certain season or um certain winters that are really good. But there's also summertime cloud ceiling that occurs, and this is usually in the plain states. Um you can have working with big thunderstorms, the bulk of this um work is with hail suppression. Uh they'll have a big thunderstorm that produces a lot of hailstones, and by introducing the same thing, the silver iodide, into the cloud, they can what they do is they get more smaller hailstones so they fall out before they they reach the ground, or at least they're smaller, and so it reduces the amount of damage that it that occurs from hail. A study in North Dakota shows that the croplands that they have in a project area there that they've reduced the amount of insurance claims by about 45% due to hail. So that's that's good. Um up in Calgary, Alberta, they run another project, and that's actually funded by by insurance companies, and that's to protect the town of Calgary from uh a potential of a billion-dollar hail storm. And if they can the insurance companies can reduce the amount of hail that's there, they can um save on their claim center that's there. So cloud seeding can happen year-round um through different mechanisms, but here in Idaho, we're just using the wintertime stuff.
SPEAKER_02I think that's that's very interesting. Something that I hadn't really thought of before is the the hail suppression side of cloud seeding. John, could you did could you touch more on that? So let's say that I'm working in agriculture, let's say that I run a run a vineyard or something. We actually did a podcast on uh vineyards not that long ago. And I'm worried about hail coming in and ruining my my crop. So I could I could use cloud seeding then to potentially avoid something like that happening. Is that that correct?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's correct. If you're in a if you're in an area that has some frequency of hail storms that have hailstones that are large enough to cause crop damage, that's where these these hail suppression programs really are focused. It's probably not cost effective to have a cloud seeding program sitting there waiting for a storm that may happen every five years or every 10 years. But if there's some frequency of occurrence that you may have a handful of both every season that could potentially be devastating to crops, that's where you see these hail suppression efforts. They'll have those hail suppression efforts generally always have aircraft in place and potentially more than one, and they will forecast those storms coming. And the the meteorologist will be watching radar and other weather conditions from models and observations, and they'll assess when the most opportune time to get the aircraft up into the storm path and start seeding that hail storm so that they can create a lot of small hailstones rather than letting the great big ones form. And those small, as Derek mentioned, those small hailstorms are less destructive to property crops or whatever it is that you're trying to protect in the storm's path.
SPEAKER_01Here in Idaho, uh you guys are probably the the largest um cloud seeders, correct?
SPEAKER_00That's correct. We uh operate the the bulk of the projects in Idaho. Um there is a project that we coordinate with that's operated through the High Country R C and D and Eastern Idaho. Um they operate manual ground generators exclusively, and then we operate, we exclusively have remotely controlled ground generators that are able to be located at parts of the watershed where people don't necessarily inhabit. So we aren't dependent on a person starting and stopping that generator from releasing silver iodide, and then we also operate aircraft.
SPEAKER_01You you talked about flying into storms. Uh could could somebody give us a you know a breakdown of what it feels like to fly into a storm? Are you guys up there for 20 minutes? Are you up there for four hours? Is there turbulence? Can you can you give me a view of what it would be like to be one of those cloud feeders? Sounds terrifying, to be honest.
SPEAKER_03So the wintertime, guys, the view is very boring. You're flying through a cloud, and so it's like a very foggy day and you can't see anything. There can be some turbulence. Most of the time, it's fairly smooth because you have the type of weather event that's just slowly rising air in the atmosphere. So there's not a lot of turbulence, but once some of these storms start to break down, then you can get quite a bit more turbulence that happens. So wintertime stuff is actually relatively boring. You're just kind of flying through a cloud, and uh the really good stuff is pretty ho-hum. Where it gets exciting is you're flying in a region in the cloud that has a super cool liquid water. And so you have this ice that starts to develop on the airframe. And that's where it becomes a little sketchy, and that's why we have meteorologists here. We try to get them in portions of the cloud that's not the not uh with a ton of that super cool liquid water. So the aircraft can fly and it doesn't build up the ice on the airframe. The the aircraft that we use are turboprop aircraft and they have de-icing capabilities, but those are on just the leading edges. So if you start to get buildup of ice on the underside of the wing, then we have to bring the aircraft home and melt that ice off. In the summertime stuff, things get a lot more exciting because then there's two types of aircraft that fly. One's a base seater, and this will tuck in underneath the thunderstorm, but it's on the part of the thunderstorm that has inflow. So it's air that's going from the ground and rising up into the atmosphere. And to me, this is the funnest spot to be because you're right out in front of the storm, you're right next to where the rainshaft or where the rain is starting to come down. And so you can see all that, you can see the bottom structure of the thunderstorm, and yet you're in air that's on a big thunderstorm, it's hardly turbulent at all. That updraft actually keeps the aircraft a lot, so they power way back on the throttles and it's quiet, and you just kind of float there along out in front of a thunderstorm and you you see it. Once again, once those thunderstorms start to break down, then you get the turbulence that happened and you start to get rocked. It's not uncommon to be sitting in the aircraft and you'll be have your seat belts on as tight as they go, but you'll hit some bumps that your head still hits the top of the aircraft. Um, you learn in a hurry not to wear a baseball cap because that little knob on the top of the hat that hurts when it nails you. So uh you can watch the every pilot or every meteorologist that goes up, they probably have a baseball hat on the first time, and after that, they won't ever wear it. You do get rocked here and there, but there's times that it's just perfectly smooth, and there's some of the best flying you'll ever have.
SPEAKER_00In a good storm, we we we can have an aircraft up there for up to four hours or so, and they have enough flares and enough fuel on board to stay on station for up to that long. But to Derek's point, we we want them to be able to stay up there that long. So the meteorologists are helping the pilots understand where the liquid water is because we don't want to ice that aircraft up too extensively too early. Otherwise, they'll have to drop down an elevation or come back to base to de-ice. So it's it's really a game of communication, of watching the weather and keeping that plane where they can stay on station and seed but not get too much ice accumulation where they have to abort their permission early.
SPEAKER_02Are there, I'm sure there's, I'm assuming there's farmers that you work with, and and how do you educate on cloud seeding and its benefits uh within agriculture?
SPEAKER_00So we um we find ourselves invited to present to the Idaho Water Resource Board, IDWR. They help with some of the education, and then also to water districts of varying sizes to get out there and really share some of the origins of cloud seeding in Idaho, how we started it, what our program looks like as far as a blend of ground generators and aircraft, which lets us seed a wide range of storage conditions. Uh if we just had one mechanism or the other, we'd be kind of limited there. And then we've been operating a program in the in the payout watershed. That was the first watershed that we started in since 2003. So at this point, we've we've got 20 years of data that we can look back at and look at it statistically and look at the cause and effect of the target area versus control areas, areas that we haven't targeted, and what has the change of precipitation been? And that story has been pretty compelling to get people on board and bring them to the table to help fund the operation of the program. Um we don't get collaborative funding for our efforts in the payette. Pretty much all those benefits come out of the payette watershed into the Snake River above our Health Canyon complex. The payette's a relatively water-rich watershed. So water users there aren't really by and large struggling to get more water. But you move into some of the other watersheds, and um, they have been willing to come forward and with the state of Idaho pool their money and help fund operations in and other watersheds, including the Boise, the Wood, and then across the Upper Snake. So really it's the education component is sharing the story of the utility and our experience with researching, developing, and then growing a cloud seeding program, and our efforts to invest in understanding some of the principles of cloud seeding and how to best operate it from a scientific perspective. We try to be pretty strategic about what storms we seed and then which ones we don't. We want to be well informed that the storms we're seeding have a good potential to benefit snowpack and the watershed. We don't really embrace just, hey, there's a storm, let's go seed it and see what happens. We apply the best science that we can. We work closely with researchers at universities and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research to better our understanding of winter cloud seeding, well, winter storm processes and then how cloud seeding augments water supplies there. And our understanding continues to evolve. And we think we find that with most groups that that application of science to a practice that's focused on augmenting those water supplies or winter snowpack. With with most audiences, that resonates pretty well that we're not just cowboying something out there and crossing our fingers and hoping it works. We're we're We're doing it in a very informed and a knowledgeable way, and we're using instrumentation to give us feedback on what the storm conditions are. And we use a lot of numerical models that simulate weather, forecast weather at a pretty high resolution for us, and those guide our operations pretty tightly so that we can best use the ground equipment and the aircraft equipment that we have in a strategic way.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Are there other organizations, you know, across the US, maybe across the globe? Um I can see directly that, you know, IDO Power with their hydropower would love more water to fall from the sky. Are there other organizations? Uh I guess insurance companies that are the ones that are paying for cloud seeding, or is it uh a wider gamut than I can even imagine?
SPEAKER_00So, yeah, Derek alluded to the insurance companies that fund cloud seeding. The state of North Dakota also funds some of the health suppression in North Dakota. The state of Wyoming conducted a large pilot project that spanned over 10 years, where they collected some uh baseline data and they did some fundamental research with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Wyoming and other research groups as well. And they have started spinning that research effort off into where they blend state money with local stakeholder money from water districts or other water stakeholders in the state. The there are lower basin states in the in the Colorado River watershed that are funding headwater cloud seeding efforts. For example, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District provides the states of Wyoming and Colorado with some money to conduct cloud seeding in the headwaters of the Green and Colorado River watersheds. Ultimately, for the goal of getting more water into the lower basin states to address water issues that they have cleared down as far as far away as Los Angeles. State of Colorado, the City of Grand Junction operates a program on the Grand Mesa, just out of Grand Junction, to augment water supplies on the on the Mesa, which supply the city of Grand Junction with the majority of its municipal water supply. Some ski areas operate cloud seeding programs to augment snowpack for recreation. There's certainly in many cases where that happens, where that additional snowpack that not only lands on the ski area but also in the surrounding mountains, that water comes off, and in most cases that also benefits irrigated agriculture municipalities, and then there's the fisheries, repairing vegetation, the water quality benefits that that flow with that as well. And as well as summertime recreation, whether it's fishing or if there's uh reservoirs that wind up with more water in them for lake or reservoir recreation opportunities or fishing in the streams and rivers.
SPEAKER_02Derek, I kind of want to go back. You mentioned something earlier that I wanted to dive into a little bit more and I thought that was interesting. You mentioned that you grew up on a farm in North North Dakota. Is that correct? That's that's correct. That's correct. So just curious, what kind of farm was it? And did you have have a scarcity of water? Is that kind of why you got interested in in water and cloud feeding, or or how did that at all start?
SPEAKER_03So the the farm that we grew up on, or I grew up on was is a small grains farm. We mainly grew uh derm wheat as well as a little bit of mustard. We had a whole bunch of other crops though throughout the years, but those were our primary two that we had. Just as a kid, I guess I just love sitting out on the tractor and watching the thunderstorms came. And we were uh we were a dry land farm, so we relied on the precipitation that that fell. We didn't have irrigation. So we had uh those thunderstorms were vital for the growth of our crops, and some years we got them, some years we didn't, and was able to just watch the the difference that happened. Um it's kind of a funny story how I ended up with cloud scening, is where I grew up, there's actually a cloud scening project that goes on. And when I was a freshman in college, I applied for an internship, but as a freshman, of course, I didn't get it because they want someone that actually knows something about the weather. And you know, I didn't know anything besides looking at the clouds at the time. Um, and so when when I graduated from college, the the same company was actually looking for a meteorologist to help run the cloud seeding project that was in a neighboring town where I grew up. And I was actually just gonna go back and work on the farm that summer. And so when they approached me and said, Hey, we remember you from uh the interview back, you know, four years prior, and they they must have been desperate, but they they hired me. And so um I ended up getting the getting the job, and it was you know kind of a fluke thing that I got into the cloud scene project, but I had a blast because there you're working with thunderstorms, and you we got to go up in the aircraft sometimes and fly around these monster thunderstorms and seeing all the lightning and uh from the air and seeing you know different hail destruction that you had from storms, and then you could see some changes that occurred within the cloud when you were when you were airborne, and then also when you're on the ground and you're running your radar, you could see some of the changes that happened within the in the cloud once you started cloud seating or you perform in cloud seating. And so that kind of hooked me. And so I I stayed with with uh cloud seating even as I went back for grad school and I started working different projects across the world uh for a little while before I ended up at Idle Power. And um the the stuff that we do here with the the wintertime orographic cloud seating, it's probably not as exciting as when you get right next to um a thunderstorm. But the research side of things on wintertime stuff is is where we can actually dive into and you can start to see a lot of the the physics change within the cloud, or you can see some of that that actual changes, and you can see it on radars, and you can see it in some of the modeling effort that we do, the numerical modeling effort. And so you can the the research side of wintertime stuff is probably the area where there's the most advancement that's going on. So there's a lot of exciting stuff that happens.
SPEAKER_00I I can add a little bit to that last little tidbit that Derek shared about research and advancements. Um, several years ago, we were working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and we were bumping into this need for more empirical or majored data in the in the atmosphere around storms that we either seeded or storms that we didn't seed, so that we were would be better able to identify the difference or the impact that we had on those storms from cloud seeding. And from that, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, they reached out to a number of academics and in different universities and research groups, and they developed a research proposal that they submitted to the National Science Foundation, NSF, and their proposal was funded. And that was one of the largest funding efforts for research focused on cloud seeding that had happened in the United States in a couple of decades. And that research effort was focused in the pay at watershed. Um, it brought in a lot of additional instrumentation. There were a number of principal investigators that were looking at different aspects of winter storm activity, and we had it had some of the Doppler on wheels, the storm-chasing radars from the Midwest placed on mountaintops here in Idaho. And the culmination of that in uh 2017 was that they collected an unprecedented data set that they're still evaluating, and they were able to measure the effect of silver iodide from its release in the atmosphere clear to the ground, and they were able to track it, which is something that had never been done before. So Derek was operating the program in the pay at. He was very close to that research effort, and we're still interacting with those scientists on a pretty regular basis today. They've released a number of remarkable publications documenting some of the progress that's happened here recently in our understanding of cloud seeding and what storm conditions that operates well in and how to monitor the success of cloud seeding. It's it's not as exciting as a hail firm in the moment, but seeing the advancement in the industry has been very rewarding, I would say, for Derek, myself, and our team.
SPEAKER_01You talk about silver iodide. Um I don't know what silver iodide is, but it seems like something I probably don't want to drink, uh, just if I were to uh throw something out there. Um I assume you guys have thousands of regulations and rules that you have to follow. Can you talk a little bit about you know how this you know fits for the environment as well?
SPEAKER_00That's a that's a really good question. Silver iodide is an inert compound made up of silver and iodide, and there's a very strong chemical bond between between those two elements. And silver iodide as a compound is insoluble in nature. So, what I mean by that is the silver iodide compound is not soluble in water. If where people get led astray is they'll they'll get interested in it, they'll hear silver iodide, they'll remember silver, they will go do a little research on the internet, and they'll discover that some forms of silver can be toxic to aquatic organisms. The important thing that they often gloss over is that those forms of silver don't exist in the natural environment. That form of silver wants to be attached to something else in a really strong way, and it just doesn't last as a free form of silver in the natural environment. So the take-home message from that is that the silver iodide compound that we use, we use it because of its hexagonal shape, which is the same shape that an ice crystal has, and it is very efficient in encouraging the formation and growth of an ice crystal in that super cool liquid water environment that Derek talked about. It grows an ice crystal at temperatures that wouldn't naturally form in a native environment without that very efficient particle being there. But once it falls to the ground, it's not soluble in water. It resides in the soils and is inert. And the quantity to add to that, the quantities over the watershed scale that we're talking about are quite limited. Um so when you look at the amount of silver that we're using, it's way below the background levels of silver in the watersheds that we're seeding by orders of magnitude.
SPEAKER_03I'll chime in a little bit on this too. Um so Sean went in and he described really well how the how it's inert, so it's not available for aquatic organisms. But if you just take silver, if you just for some some mechanism or somehow all the stuff that we put out there was silver, not silver iodide, there's still silver that's naturally occurring in the environment. Uh, you have silver mines that are all over the mountains, and the amount that's there naturally dwarfs the amount that we're putting on there. If you'd go sample snow or you look at the snow that we've seeded and you try to sample it, if you just take a say you have a nalogene bottle and you'd scoop out a bunch of uh snow, that nalogene bottle would have more silver that's in it that would contaminate that sample that that's there, way beyond what we'd have put in there from from cloud seeding. If you'd wear clothes that, you know, synthetic clothing, just being you in the environment would produce more silver into that environment than what we're putting in there with uh with cloud seeding. Um to put that into a little bit more perspective, we've actually done some silver sampling. Uh we've sampled the the snowpack after we've cloud seeded to try to find the silver that we've had. The the plastic vials that we use to collect the samples, they go through a two to three month cleaning process before we can use them. And they use ultra-clean water, they use acid, and it's these bass that go back and forth just to remove any contamination that's there. Um, just to just so we can try to sample it, because those vials would have more silver in them than what we're trying to find. So it's uh the process that it takes to even find what we're putting into the atmosphere is is so intense that you know it's it's there. So that's silveridides inert, so it's not available, plus the amounts are so small that you can't even hardly find it.
SPEAKER_00To put those quantities into context, when we go sample the the snowpack, we're looking for particles that are like looking for a few grains of salt among several Olympic swimming pools of water. So we're not looking we're looking for something that is very, very minute. Minute interesting minuscule. Yes.
SPEAKER_02Once you release these particles into a cloud, of course we know the clouds are nomadic. They they don't stick around in one place. So if you're if you're cloud fitting here in Idaho, um is there a way to control or the enhancement of the precipitation that comes down in Idaho, or what if it goes off into Wyoming? Is there a way to control that, or is that just part of part of the process of cloudfitting is to expect some of that?
SPEAKER_03So there's there's you you expect some of that downwind um additional precipitation that falls. We have a we have a target area and we set up whether we're flying aircraft or we're burning our generation, um, burning the generators that we have, those are all upwind of the target area. And when we grow a snowflake, we grow it by a natural state. Once that silver iodide's in that cloud, everything else that happens beyond that is just a natural growth of the snowflake. And that takes somewhere between oh, it's around 30 minutes in a decent storm to get to a size that's big enough that it can fall to the ground and it reaches the ground as precipitation. So if you're looking at um a storm system that you seed, it's 30 minutes later that storm continues to move downwind that that fallout happens. So you do have benefit that all our benefit occurs downwind from where we see it. The the big question is how far does that go? And when you look at literature and you look at a lot of the studies that have been out there, it's very hard to track because originally you're looking at a 10% increase that falls within the target area. What happens beyond that? Um, and what research shows is that there's a benefit that occurs up to another, you know, 100, 200 miles downwind of that target area that you still have a positive effect. It starts to taper off, but you do have a positive effect. And then once you get beyond that, it goes back to neutral. So you don't you can't determine one way or the other. So you stay um just in the natural variability downwind. And so that's kind of what happens. So you do have a benefit that continues on from cloud seeing, but at some point downwind, it uh goes back to neutral.
SPEAKER_00Your your question kind of hinges on on why we have a team of scientists here that operate our program. We have some specific target areas that benefit either us as a utility or our collaborators that are water users or the state of Idaho that also participate in funding the operations. And in order to make sure that we're getting the snowpack where we will benefit from it, we need to target storms or seed storms that have specific wind characteristics, temperature characteristics, and we need to understand the storm paths, where they're coming from and where they're going, so that we have some assurance that we're getting that additional water or snowpack in the areas that we're intending to see. But to the root of your question, weather and and storm systems really don't understand political boundaries or watershed boundaries. So once you initiate that that process by putting those those uh silver iodide particles in the atmosphere, Mother Nature is going to take over and it's gonna use those particles to grow snowflakes that some of which will ultimately fall to the ground. And that happens wherever it happens. So if we understand the moisture content and the temperatures, we'll have some understanding of how quickly those snowflakes will grow, and then if we understand the winds, we'll understand how far they'll transport downstream and whereas most of them are going to fall out.
SPEAKER_01I have a follow-up. Um, if we start a storm here in southeastern Idaho, does that take away water from uh eastern Montana that'll get that storm here in you know 15 hours?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's a that's a good question. Um, first of all, when you say start a storm, we actually don't create storms. We work with uh natural storms that are already there, and then we just um they just become a little bit more efficient with cloud seam. The second part of your question there is getting at uh the raw Peter to PayPal. So if we dump a bunch of precipitation here in Idaho, does Montana get none then? The the answer to that is no. With cloud seaming, to put things in perspective, the research out there shows that there's there's a positive effect downwind, and then it goes to neutral, and then they can't determine downwind from that. And why that is, is when we go back to the first part of this podcast, we talked about how a storm is very insufficient at transitioning the super cool liquid water that's in the atmosphere into precipitation on the ground. And with cloud seeding, if you have a 15% increase in precipitation, you're still taking less than 1% of the total water vapor that's in the cloud out of the atmosphere. Um so you're taking very little bit of the water vapor, the moisture, or whatever that's there, and putting it on the ground. So the bulk of what's left still continues downwind. You're taking so a very small amount out. And then the atmosphere is very dynamic. Um, if you guys have heard of the atmospheric rivers, or if you go back, you're a little bit older than Pineapple Express. You have these rivers that are in the atmosphere that are funneling in moisture into a cloud. And so that cloud is moving across, but then it has this river that's flowing into that cloud that's continuing to um bring in more moisture, bring in more of that super cool liquid water that's vital for the the snowfall. And so once that transitions down, the moisture that's in the cloud wasn't even the same moisture that was there that was over Idaho. You have this new tap that's that's bringing that moisture in into Montana, into the North Dakota where I grew up, or you continue on. And that's why these storms continue on as they move down. It just has a different tap of water. And so you take very little out, plus there's a tap of water that comes in. And ultimately, all the silver iodide that's in the cloud doesn't get used up. So that stays with the cloud as it as it transitions downwind too. And that can help to make that cloud more efficient, even as it continues downwind.
SPEAKER_02Once again, on dirt road discussions, we are joined by John Parkinson and Derek Blesttrude from Idaho Power. Um, we've been talking about cloud seeding. And for me, I just have one quick question. This is kind of a lightning round question. Favorite cloud?
SPEAKER_03Well, it's obviously the cumulus with the big thunderstorms and uh the hail that comes out, but there's a lot of other stuff. Like when you have those big clouds, you have what's called Momantis clouds underneath. And these are the little bubbly stuff that comes comes down. Um, some of those produce um amazing pictures, and they're always exciting to see. But yeah, there's just a lot of things within a cumulimbus, a thunderstorm that that's the most exciting.
SPEAKER_00I'd have to say I like the ones that put a lot of snow in the mountains. Those are the best ones. Absolutely. Can I touch on a uh on another topic that we haven't hit on that might be of of interest? That batter. Well, one thing I'd like to add with respect to operating our cloud seeding program, and we've we've learned this over the years, that the interest in cloud seeding can be somewhat soluble with good snowpack. And then the interest goes way up, meaning that the interest goes down when when water conditions are good, but when water conditions are poor, the interest goes way up. And particularly in a in a scenario like Southern Idaho, where we've got Reservoir systems and we're dependent on on winter snowpack for the the bulk of our water supplies. It's good to understand that cloud sitting is not a drought busting tool. It's not something that you do when you're when you don't have storms to seed. It's not something you do when you're desperate for water. As Derek's mentioned several times, it's a long-term water management tool and it's a water management strategy. So we do it year after year at year after year application. It augments that winter snowpack. A fair portion of that goes to subsurface flows. We see that as base flows, some of it goes to groundwater, and it gives us more assurance of reservoir carryover. We see higher instream flows. So it's that repetitious year-in-year-out application of it that really benefits us long term. And that's what's going to carry us through periods when we don't have great seeding opportunities. So it's not a good practice to turn on and off. It's something to look at as something that we do as a long-term strategy.
SPEAKER_01Well, I uh I'll just finish up here. Um, I have one last question. On the Dirt Road Discussion podcast, we like to look down the road. What do you guys see as the future of cloud seeding and and weather manipulation as a whole?
SPEAKER_03We're going to control the world. No. What's you know, what we've seen with cloud seeing is you can just nudge Mother Nature a little bit. And it's it's going to continue to be just another, you know, arrow in the quiver for water management that we have. As we continue to identify storms that we can seed and identify the best times to seed, we'll get more efficient at what we're doing. But the the benefit, the year-long benefit that we have, that 10%, is is probably going to remain in the in the ballpark unless new technology comes up. But um right now we don't see that technology that's there. Um but the efficiencies that we have, we're going to continue to refine those and become better at what we do.
SPEAKER_00I agree with that. And I would also add that somewhat on the heels of uh of some of the recent publications from the Snowy Research and then more extreme weather conditions in the West, a lot of that low water supplies. The inquiries that we've been getting from watersheds or water users in areas that don't have cloud seeding, wanting to learn about cloud seeding, wanting to learn whether it's a viable strategy for them to apply to mitigate some of their water supply issues. I believe along with the research is is going to probably result in more programs operating, at least in the West, where we're struggling with having enough water to do, continue to do what we do or what we've learned to do, and uh support our industries and agriculture and all that. So I I would suspect that we'll see more interest in it. Some of that's gonna turn into more programs, and ultimately that'll probably help fund some additional research to further our understanding of when and where to apply it and what the benefits are as we move into the future.
SPEAKER_03And a lot of that benefit analysis that we have, that's ultimately where we're gonna get from this. Um, and a lot of the research that we're doing now is to try to use numerical models. So these are the weather models to figure out what the benefits are. So if you see the storm, what would have happened naturally, and then what did happen because of cloud scening, you can get a difference in that, and that shows the benefit. And this is kind of where the research is going. And the the more we get confident in those models to show the the benefit and the reanalysis of those storms, that's gonna help to um just grow cloud scanning because more and more people are gonna identify where cloud scanning helps them and how they can be a part of it.
SPEAKER_02Uh, with that, I guess we'll wrap up this episode of road discussions. Uh, Derek and Sean, thank you so much again for your time and for your expertise in this area. We'll see you down the road on another episode of the