Why Couldn't Wyoming Wildfires Be Put Out By Cloud Seeding?
- by Cowboy State Daily
- Oct 27, 2024
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With a huge wildfire season in Wyoming this year, one question people ask is why isn't cloud seeding used to induce rain and snow to fall on the fires. The simple answer is you have to have clouds to do that. (Photo by Chad Flanagan, Lifelong Dayton Resident)
Wyoming uses cloud seeding
as an environmentally friendly way to squeeze a little more snow from clouds, boosting annual snowpack. That feeds a little more water into its reservoirs to supply both cities and agriculture.
But, if this technique is truly effective, why isn’t it being used to help fight wildfires?
With almost a million acres of land burned up in Wyoming this year by wildfire, it’s a question Wyomingites are asking from quite a few online social media street corners like Facebook and Twitter.
But, in the case of cloud seeding and wildfire, it’s really down to the science, and what cloud seeding is — or, in the case of wildfires, what it is not.
“One very important thing to know about cloud seeding is that for it to even have a chance, first of all you’d need a cloud,” Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day said. “You can argue about whether cloud seeding is going to help a lot, or a little, or not at all, but it only works when it’s going to rain anyway.”
Cloud Seeding Can’t Conjure Clouds
Wyoming’s wildfires have been caused in large part by a lack of clouds to produce rain in the first place.
And that’s the primary reason why cloud seeding is ineffective when it comes to fighting wildfires. The technique might be able to squeeze incrementally more moisture from a cloud.
But it cannot conjure the rain clouds in the first place.
It only works when there is an existing cloud, one that already has some moisture in it.
Then it can be effective in triggering a cloud to release its moisture. There’s also some evidence that cloud seeding methods may wring just a little bit more water from the cloud than it would have released on its own.
But it cannot create moisture from thin air. It’s not going to work where it’s been dry as a bone for weeks on end.
“If you have clear skies and high pressure, you can’t just go up and throw out some silver iodide and expect it to work,” Day said. “That’s just not how cloud seeding works.”
The Life Of An Ice Angel
Most rain actually starts life in the upper atmosphere, where things are quite cold — far colder than the 32 degrees that’s considered the freezing point of water.
“When liquid water is in the form of small droplets that are smaller than a millimeter, much smaller than a millimeter, it’s actually difficult to freeze those droplets,” University of Wyoming atmospheric scientist Jeff French told Cowboy State Daily. “Sometimes those droplets will remain liquid to temperatures down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit or 10 degrees Fahrenheit before they freeze.”
These little ice angels of super-cooled water are content to float in the heavens forever, with no thought of falling to earth at all.
In fact, if they don’t start freezing and clumping together, they’ll just stay that way until the clouds dissipate, with no rain or snow falling at all.
It’s in those cases where scientists believe substances like silver iodide can be the hat trick of the party, helping all the little ice angels get over their social anxiety and freeze already, so they can start clumping together and falling from the heavens to earth.
If it’s warm, they melt and become rain. If it’s cold, they stay frozen and become snowflakes — or maybe sleet or hail, depending on how the little freezing party got started in the first place.
“But if it’s cold and a cloud already has plenty of natural ice in it, cloud seeding at that point isn’t effective,” French said. “Or if a cloud is really warm, no matter what you add to it, it’s not going to promote freezing. So, there’s kind of a little sweet spot in there.”
Further defining the sweet spot conditions where cloud seeding can help is the subject of French’s research, and it’s something he’s been studying for decades.
“In the conditions where cloud seeding really, really works, we have a pretty good handle on it,” he said. “And in the conditions where it’s not going to make any impact at all, we have a pretty good handle on it. But there’s a lot of area between those two, right, that we need to better understand.”
With a huge wildfire season in Wyoming this year, one question people ask is why isn't cloud seeding used to induce rain and snow to fall on the fires. The simple answer is you have to have clouds to do that. (Getty Images)
With a huge wildfire season in Wyoming this year, one question people ask is why isn't cloud seeding used to induce rain and snow to fall on the fires. The simple answer is you have to have clouds to do that. (Getty Images)
With a huge wildfire season in Wyoming this year, one question people ask is why isn't cloud seeding used to induce rain and snow to fall on the fires. The simple answer is you have to have clouds to do that. (Getty Images)
With a huge wildfire season in Wyoming this year, one question people ask is why isn't cloud seeding used to induce rain and snow to fall on the fires. The simple answer is you have to have clouds to do that. (Getty Images)
With a huge wildfire season in Wyoming this year, one question people ask is why isn't cloud seeding used to induce rain and snow to fall on the fires. The simple answer is you have to have clouds to do that. (Getty Images)
With a huge wildfire season in Wyoming this year, one question people ask is why isn't cloud seeding used to induce rain and snow to fall on the fires. The simple answer is you have to have clouds to do that. (Cowboy State Daily Staff)
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