Make It Rain

This season is all about the wild ways we’re engineering nature to save the planet, but it turns out the U.S. has a pretty dark history when it comes to using tech that messes with the weather. During the Vietnam War, in an attempt to prolong the monsoon season, the U.S. Air Force conducted secret cloud seeding operations to flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a lifeline for the North Vietnamese military.

In 1972, toward the end of the war, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh uncovered details of the program, called Operation Popeye. The Senate held hearings and in 1977 the U.S. and more than 30 other countries signed the Environmental Modification Convention, banning weather warfare.

Flash forward almost 50 years and cloud seeding is being used in a much different context, to save the Great Salt Lake. “I think it's doable,” said Augustus Doricko, the 25-year-old founder of Rainmaker, a modern cloud seeding company, “I think that you can actually stop the aridification of the lake with cloud seeding, along with the rest of the tools that are available.”

The lake is the largest salt water lake in the Western hemisphere and it’s an economic engine. Its brine shrimp and mineral extraction industries are responsible for thousands of jobs and $2.5 billion annually.

Cloud seeding has been around for eighty years, first discovered in the 1940s by scientists at General Electric. It involves releasing particles, usually silver iodide, into clouds to help generate more rain or snow.

The only problem? It was hard to show just how well it works. Even Operation Popeye was considered a flop. But cloud seeding technology has changed in recent years. Unlike the original cloud seeders of the 1940s and ‘50s, Rainmaker uses drone and radar technology.

In 2023 Doricko went to a weather modification conference in Colorado. “I did myself no favors at that conference, because I was wearing a Kid Cudi Kanye West collab hoodie, and I had [a mullet], and I was 23,” he explained, “I like to say that I set expectations low with my appearance so that I can pleasantly surprise people in conversation later.”

It was at that conference he learned about a recent experiment by atmospheric scientists. Using radars and airborne sensors scientists showed you could seed certain kinds of winter clouds with silver iodide and actually detect the manmade precipitation.

That was the “aha” moment for Doricko. Shortly after he started Rainmaker. Today the company has almost 120 employees, and has operated in six states, and on four continents.

In the lobby of Rainmaker’s operations in Salt Lake City a sign hanging up says, “We Can Refill The Great Salt Lake.”

But not everyone agrees.

“There's no scientific evidence in terms of what cloud seeding can do to be able to support a claim like that,” explained Jeff French, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wyoming.

French was part of a study on cloud seeding that originally inspired Doricko to pursue this field, back at that conference in 2023.

“The only way that world happens is if you change the water usage, right? I mean, can you get flows of the Colorado back to old levels? Well, if we change our water usage, then probably we can,” he said, “but increasing precipitation by, you know, by 5% or 10%, that's not going to do it.”

In this episode of “How We Survive,” host Amy Scott tags along with a team of cloud seeders in Utah as they attempt to try to save the Great Salt Lake, and build a rainmaking empire.