ng playbook
Courtesy of justin broglio, desert research institute
d be a surprising new weapon in the fight against Worsening droughts
Research Institute, part of the Nevada system of higher education, has been seeding clouds since the 1960s. DRI now has two programs in Nevada and one in California’s Sierra Nevada. Last winter they had logged more than a thousand hours of seeding by the time I visited in February. The DRI campus is perched on a scrubby hill at the edge of Reno. The main building has a rounded concrete cornice and gleaming windows reflecting the Sierra Nevada. The place looks like HQ for a cabal of scientists intent on starting World War C, but its real aspirations are much more modest. Funded by the state, by irrigation and water districts, and by federal agencies, DRI’s scientists are work-
ing to increase the snowpack that feeds Nevada’s water supply by at least 5 percent and perhaps as much as 15 percent. Those numbers are hardly insignificant when conditions in the West have spawned talk of “mega-drought” and “regional disaster.” There have always been crazy schemes for modifying the weather: rain dances, hail cannons, intentionally set forest fires. Cloud seeding with aerosolized silver iodide was invented in 1946 by the GE scientist Bernard Vonnegut—the novelist Kurt’s older brother. A promising young chemist, Vonnegut was working with the Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir and his associate Vincent Schaefer when the fall 2013
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