Should we play God?

It seems like less and less people are outdoors these days. And when they are, they often are looking down at their phones instead of enjoying the beauty of God’s creation. It seems not too many people are concerned with the constant weather modification planes leaving streaks in the sky on a near daily basis. We have questions. What if this technology fell into the hands of the wrong people—people that didn’t particularly like Americans? What could these weather modifications do to our ecosystem, or even yet, our bodies? If they can control the weather, why are there more hurricanes now more than ever? What happens if you continually block the sun with these hazy man-made clouds? Why do they create such gorgeous pink and orange sunsets? Why does someone want to manipulate a creation made by a perfect Creator? How much money might be involved in this operation? Who is ultimately funding it? What are these chemicals doing to our water, soil? With “climate change” being such a scary topic from so many on the left, why are they not up in arms about this man-made climate change? Can this create climate change? Could this be the tool to initiate a much-needed crisis for funding a Green New Deal or instituting a carbon tax? There are so many questions and most people don’t look up to see what’s going on.

We won’t call them chemtrails or we’d be called a crazy conspiracy theorist. But we’re not calling them contrails either (condensation trails). We know they are not contrails because of the information from actual cloudseeding companies that admit they are putting salt and other products in the air. According to the website of the Texas Weather Modification Association, the first “hint” of the potential of human activity to alter the behavior of clouds came just after the Civil War, when civil engineer Edward Powers made the observation that rainstorms often occurred where major battles between Union and Confederate troops were waged. The immense smoke, dust, and other particulate matter put into the air during conflict seemed to invigorate clouds to rain more.

Weather Modification has been tried since 1891 in Texas, the first attempt by patent attorney Robert Dyrenforth, who was given a $2,000 grant by the U.S. Congress to do a series of rain making experiments near Midland. Severe droughts have driven the need for weather modification since it’s beginning, and the current attempt is no exception. Ground based generators have been used in several parts of the state over the years; then airplanes were tried, delivering dry ice, and then flares, and generators producing silver iodide particles.

Entrepreneur C. W. Post, founder of the Post cereal company, established a “beach-head” along the Caprock, at present-day Post, Texas during the early 1910’s to experiment with explosives to disturb promising rain clouds. Post and his team of researchers conducted numerous trials during 19111914, using dynamite strategically placed just below and along the Caprock. While rain fell on some days, the results of the experiments were never conclusive.

Numerous “rain-making” endeavors sprouted in Texas during the terrible drought of the 1950’s. Some of the (Continued on page 12)

projects used ground-based generators to dispense agents such as silver iodide, while others featured aircraft that released various hygroscopic and glaciogenic seeding materials, including dry ice.

The 1950’s drought, and subsequent droughts in the early 1960’s, prompted so much cloud-seeding that the Texas Legislature was led to enact the Texas Weather Modification Act in 1967. That act required any individual, or organization, attempting to modify the weather to obtain a weathermodification license and permit from the State’s water agency. In 1997, the State of Texas made its initial commitment to sponsoring rain-enhancement projects by devoting $550,000 to costshare, with four political subdivisions, for cloud-seeding activities using aircraft. Subsequent legislative sessions increased funding for these, and other projects, first through the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC) and then to Texas Department of Agriculture.

In the 1960s, an experimental

weather-modification operation was

underway. Called Project Stomfury, the military deployed pilots (pictured here) armed with silver iodide in the hopes of weakening damaging tropical storms. NOAA

transport of the raindrops into the supercooled portion of the cloud where the raindrops freeze due to their larger size; (5) invigoration of the cloud due to released latent heat and growth of the frozen drops to large graupel by accretion of the cloud water; and (6) increased radar-estimated rainfall at cloud base and presumably more rainfall at the ground, when the enhanced water mass moves downward through the cloud (Mather et al., 1997).

Companies such as Seeding Operations & Atmospheric Research (SOAR) dedicated to provide weather modification operational services and atmospheric research technologies.

SOAR, according to their website, prides itself in being an elite group of researchers and operators with a mission to conduct sound scientific weather modification research and cloud seeding operations efficiently, professionally and safely. SOAR’s goals are to continue researching precipitation processes and atmospheric aerosol interactions, and to improve the capabilities of atmospheric research aircraft with new and modern instrumentation.

At the center of SOAR’s operations are new frontiers in weather modification. SOAR has conducted operational and research weather modification programs worldwide using the most technologically advanced instrumentation available.

Seeding at cloud base with hygroscopic material to produce precipitation increases is predicated on the assumption that the rain-producing process evolves in the following manner: (1) the introduction at cloud base of large and giant cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) produced by burning hygroscopic flares in racks mounted to the wings of the seeder aircraft; (2) preferential activation of the larger CCN from the flares, leading to a broadening of the cloud droplet distribution; (3) growth of the large cloud droplets into raindrops via natural coalescence processes, in clouds which could not otherwise have grown raindrops through warm-rain processes; (4) the Planned research with hygroscopic seeding in Texas was conducted in 2005 utilizing the SOAR research aircraft and its crew. Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld and Dr. William Woodley identified a patented means of processing common salt (NaCl) to virtually any desired size as verified after production by analysis with an electron microscope.

The Texas Weather Modification Association lists their programs on their website such as the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District (PGWCD) in Whitedeer, TX as well as SOAR in Plains, TX, South Texas Weather Modification Association (STWMA) in Pleasanton, TX, the West Texas Weather Modification Association (WTWMA) in San Angelo, TX, and the Trans Pecos Weather Modification Association (TPWMA).

According to the Texas Department of Licensing & Regulation, seven cloud seeding projects today cover about 31 million acres (or about one-sixth of the land area of the state). When a severe drought was a greater threat at the end of the previous century, as many as 51 million acres were included in cloud seeding “target” areas in the state. Texas’ present-day cloud seeding efforts are much more than wellconsidered responses to drought, however. They are also concerted efforts, using the latest technological tools and understanding, to replenish freshwater supplies in aquifers and reservoirs as well as to help meet the growing needs of agriculture, industry, and municipalities for fresh water. Political subdivisions like water conservation districts and county commissions have embraced the technology of rain enhancement as one element of a longterm, water-management strategy designed to ensure a growing population has enough water to meet its future needs. Each of the cloud seeding projects uses specially-equipped aircraft designed to place seeding materials (in the form of pyrotechnic devices, or flares, containing silver iodide and other compounds) into convective towers (turrets of growing thunderstorms) to induce them to expand and process more atmospheric water. The seeding is achieved by burning flares either mounted on the wings of single and twin-engine aircraft or held in racks, and dropped (ejected), from the underside of the aircraft fuselage. Pilots in the aircraft are directed to convective clouds believed by the meteorologist to be treatable with the seeding agent. Timing and targeting are the two critical factors in successful seeding of young thunderstorms. The concerted efforts of both pilot(s) and meteorologist are designed to give the growing cloud a “nudge” to enable it to be more efficient in the way it uses available cloud droplets to grow raindrops.

As each of the rain enhancement projects became established in recent years, state matching funds were allocated to the sponsoring groups to enable them to procure needed hardware such as specially-equipped aircraft and ground-based radar systems. Each project initially constructed its program, either leasing or purchasing aircraft, at a cost of 8 to 9 cents per acre, with the state assuming up to 4.5 cents of that cost. Eventually, the state share of the cost declined, such that today no residual state funds are used to sustain these programs. From the time the state began paying in part for the programs (1997) until state funds were exhausted (2004), the state contributed about $11.7 million. An additional $1.5 million in State funds was spent during that time to assess the projects’ performance.

No state funds are available for the current biennium (which began on September 1, 2022) for any cloud seeding operations in Texas. Rain enhancement projects this year are being funded exclusively by underground water conservation districts and other local political subdivisions like county commissions and aquifer authorities.

Each year an independent analyst at Texas Tech University uses Doppler weather radar data from the National Weather Service network to assess the impact of these rain-enhancement projects on seasonal rainfall within the projects’ target areas. The analysis of cloud-seeding operations conducted by these projects in 2019 showed that, on average, individual seeded thunderstorms lived 22 minutes longer (or 41 percent) than untreated storms in the vicinity and covered some 44 percent more area than the unseeded ones. Rain output from seeded storms, on average, was 24 percent more than that from nearby untreated storms. The total number (101 in all) of single, isolated thunderstorms that were seeded produced an estimated 101,031 acre-feet above and beyond what could have been expected without intervention. More complex thunderstorm clusters that were seeded were observed, by radar, to have yielded an estimated 956,657 additional acre-feet of rainwater. The cost to produce this additional rainwater was estimated at less than $11 an acre-foot.

According to Scientific American, on Jan. 19, 2017, a research plane roared through the gray skies above Idaho’s Payette River Basin, spewing silver iodide into the air. Assembled on the snow-capped peaks below, snow gauges and portable radar machines were poised to measure the snow that scientists hoped would follow.

It was the beginning of an experiment that would turn cloud seeding science on its head. Known as the SNOWIE project—short for “Seeded and Natural Orographic Wintertime Clouds” — the study provided some of the first quantitative evidence that cloud seeding actually works.

For three days that January, weather conditions would align to set up the perfect cloud seeding experiment. The sky was cold and cloudy—but no snow was falling. Over the course of these three days, the research plane would make more than a dozen trips over the mountaintops, releasing the same amount of silver iodide each time.

“For three days there was cloud cover, but no snowfall, no natural precipitation,” said Katja Friedrich, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who helped lead the SNOWIE project. “We put the seeding material into the supercooled liquid cloud, and we were able to generate precipitation. And that was very revolutionary.” Thanks to high-tech radar equipment, the scientists were able to monitor the response of the clouds from the moment the silver iodide was released into the air until the moment snow began to fall. Over the course of those three days, the scientists estimated that around 286 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of snow fell from the clouds they seeded.

Friedrich and her colleagues, including scientists from Colorado, Wyoming, Illinois and Idaho, published their findings in a groundbreakingpaperlast year inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

SNOWIE came in the midst of a kind of a renaissance for cloud seeding research in the United States. After years of relatively little scientific interest in weather modification, a series of projects over the last decade have paved the way for new insights.

We can understand the need for water for a growing population on the planet. But we still don’t have answers to the major questions. We, again, will refrain from calling the trails chemtrails even though they readily admit that silver iodide in the sky. What we would like to know is what the effect of sliver iodide-produced precipitation does to the natural water ecosystem as well as the soil. We would also like to know why so many people have had bronchial ailments recently when the skies have been peppered since New Years Day in North Texas. There are so many questions and the still the most basic one is, should we be playing God?