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25 juillet 2023 - 17:33
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Humans finally figured out how to make it rain
Cloud seeding, explained. We flew up to see it with our own eyes.
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For decades, drought-stricken areas around the world have practiced “cloud seeding,” a process where chemical flares full of silver iodide are shot into clouds to encourage them to rain. But until recently, the science didn’t quite back this practice up. In large part, that’s because operational cloud seeding programs don’t have the luxury of conducting controlled tests — they have an obligation to produce as much rain as possible for the people living under the clouds they seed.
But there’s been a new breakthrough. In 2017, a major cloud seeding experiment in the mountains of Idaho showed that cloud seeding works; shooting chemical flares into the sky does produce more precipitation.
As the world faces an increasing number of heat waves and droughts, banking water is becoming more and more important. And while we don’t know exactly how life-changing cloud seeding will turn out to be, we do know it has the potential to be a tool in our arsenal in the long battle against worsening droughts.
To understand how cloud seeding works and what it’s already doing in Texas, watch this video and take a trip up to the clouds to see it yourself.
The Future Perfect team at Vox explores big problems and the big ideas that can tackle them. Read more here: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect
This video was made possible by a grant from the BEMC Foundation.
Sources and further reading:
To get a deeper understanding of droughts in all their complexity, how they interact with the water cycle, and how climate change makes them worse, check out NRDC’s guide:
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drought-everything-you-need-know
To understand how tree-ring data and modern data are combined to get a better understanding of droughts over the last thousand years, check out this report:
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/megadrought-southwestern-north-america
To keep track of the many, severe droughts across the US, you can use the US Drought Monitor:
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?west
To read about Texas’s state climate summary for 2022, click on this link:
https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/tx/#:~:text=Temperatures%20in%20Texas%20have%20risen,increases%20in%20extreme%20heat%20events.
To explore how Texas temperatures have changed over time, check out NOAA’s data here:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/statewide/time-series/41/tavg/ann/6/1895-2022?base_prd=true&begbaseyear=1901&endbaseyear=2000
You can check out the results of the game-changing experiment that verified cloud seeding works here:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1917204117#sec-3
To read more about the United Nation’s predictions for droughts and water shortages, check out their report here:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/drought-2050-un-report-climate-change/
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