Cloud seeding

You spent some time with a company called Rainmaker that actually uses drones to help make rain.

Yes, they are doing something called cloud seeding.

Rainmaker is one of many companies, and this is not a new process.

Cloud seeding is something that started back in the 1940s.

A couple of American scientists figured it out.

GE put a lot of money toward it.

or rain, and then it falls out of the cloud and you make precipitation where you wouldn't have.

So it's kind of giving Mother Nature a boost.

To your point about water, Saifud, that problem takes us straight back to what you saw in Indonesia, right? There's manpower on the ground, yes.

Firefighting operations, even attempts to reduce rain with cloud seeding.

I think both countries are experimenting with that.

Yet officials say what they really need is sustained rainfall.

But that doesn't mean Indonesian authorities are just sitting around waiting for the rainy season to come, right? It really is all hands on deck in Indonesia.

the government has already deployed more than 43,000 personnels from various agencies across six priority provinces, and West Kalimantan is one of them.

They're supported from the air by 34 aircraft conducting water bombing operations and another 19 involved in cloud seeding.

But both have their limitations.

So I'm proud to say we're back with some hard science to make it rain.

Or snow, using cloud seeding with natural proteins.

It's super cool.

But it could be a little nefarious to control the weather.

The technology for making it rain and snow already exists.

It's existed for 50 years.

It's called cloud seeding, and it's held back by the chemical that is used for cloud seeding.

That chemical has poor activity and is also not great for the environment.

New technology is taking cloud seeding to an all-new level, even providing hope that it can help save the dwindling Great Salt Lake.

On today's show, we'll look at new efforts that could boost the amount of precipitation we get from winter storms.

And on this 9-8-8 day, how one high school is taking extra steps to prevent teens from taking their own lives.

But basically, the company's name is Rainmaker Technology Corporation.

They're based out of California, but they are involved in developing their technology around the West, and they're already partnering with, it sounds like, multiple states, including the state of Utah.

But they... brand themselves as a next gen cloud seeding technology company.

And basically what they do is they will launch their drones up into the sky on into essentially clouds that could produce rain.

They'll release a chemical compound that basically helps create larger rain droplets that will then fall.

I'm kicking off season nine of the podcast with a very special guest talking about a very unique topic.

There's a lot of discussion about cloud seeding, producing more water, water conservation issues.

And I brought someone who is changing the narrative here.

augustus dorico uh who is from el segundo california i'm very familiar with southern california it's always nice to meet uh fellow californians but him and his company are doing very interesting things augustus i wanted to tell you that i actually first heard of your company when i went to a capitol hill meeting earlier this summer and all of capitol south metro station was plastered with your guys's uh signage so it caught my attention and one of your associates um is a friend of a friend.

Why don't you introduce yourself and the company? What are you guys aiming to do?

My name is Augustus Dorico.

I'm the founder and CEO of Rainmaker, and we're a next-gen cloud seeding company with the ambition to make water abundant in the American West.

And we're doing it with advanced remote sensing, advanced drones that can fly into severe winter weather, and then a bunch of machine learning ultimately to put more snowpack, to put more water down throughout the American West's mountains and reservoirs like Lake Mead, Lake Powell, the Great Salt Lake, and the Colorado River.

The way that scientists monitor el nno Is through a region called the nino three point four region which is basically a rectangular area Of the Tropical and Central Pacific uh about twice the area of India , and when sea surface temperatures there Are half a degree above average for the time of year and that Heat is sustained for several consecutive months El nino is declared That happened earlier this summer and Those sea surface temperatures are now well above average .We're talking about the latest three month average May June July being one point three nine celsius Above average and the most recent weekly reading gave a two point six Celsius anomaly Now let's put that into context ...A strong l nina would be considered One to two degrees above average And the strongest on record twenty fifteen Twenty sixteen's L nino dubbed Super EL NInO That peaked at two point six celcius above average And this El nino hasn't peaked yet Its likely to peak later this year Late autumn early winter So theres more warming to come & what the met office are predicting is that it will peak At three degrees above average That would make it the strongest in Living Memory ..but other organizations Around the World Are Predicting even warmer Than that Four Degrees Or More Of Warming SO THIS IS BEING DUBBED THE STRONGEST EL NINEO EVER RECORDED AND PERHAPS EVEN FURTHER BACK THAN THAT FOR CENTURIES

Wow I mean those numbers are insane Um were seeing alot in the news Like You Mentioned indonesia Theres the wildfires Across Kalimantan To the Indonesian Part Borneo..and There's Toxic Haze Smoke umm now in Malaysia & the Philippines becuase of this& i think i read this morning that in Jakarta the Capital of Indonesia that they haven't Experienced any Rain in a Significant period of Time TO THE POINT THAT THEYRE INTERESTED IN DOING CLOUD SEEDING BUT THE clouds arent in the Right Sort OF State To Do That But WHAT IMPACT IS THIS SUPER EL NIÑO AROUND OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD

WORLDEssentially, what this does is it creates opposite weather and climate impacts compared with normal.

So Indonesia, typically lots of rain, turns much drier.

We know that do without wilt is the whole of the law.

So the NOAA, that's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they tried something called cloud seeding.

Don't

condescend to me.

I know what the IOACA.

NOAA, that's what I call them.

In the 60s, 70s and 80s, they tried something called cloud seeding, which was supposed to help with droughts and shit.

They taught me about this in school.

143 million gallons of rain.

Now, cloud seeding has been around forever.

It's started militarily.

Its big use was in Vietnam, but...

Cloud seeding is used for reforesting, et cetera.

There's only one problem with this.

Evidently, in Florida, cloud seeding, and I don't understand why, but cloud seeding is a felony.

Max, what's interesting about this is even though we're talking about Florida being a felony and evidently also in Tennessee, the Western states, Colorado, California, Wyoming, and Texas, who are suffering major droughts of water, are actually using these to increase the rainfall over those states to produce water because of the drought conditions.

They recently flew drones over the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, releasing a chemical called silver iodide directly into the clouds.

This is a modern take on cloud seeding.

The mechanism here relies on nucleation.

Water vapor in clouds often needs a physical particle to freeze onto in order to become heavy enough to fall as precipitation.