Humans finally figured out how to make it rain

for decades this region in West Texas has been pummeled with droughts reservoirs and lakes often sit almost empty grass has gone Brown and crops are struggling last rain was in October we went through all the winter months with no rain our cotton as you can see none of it's came up every acre of our cotton just imagined on bare soil that's bone dry In the Heat of Texas things can sometimes look bleak but what if I told you that there's a way to help fix this problem by flying into the clouds and making them rain [Music] this graph shows Texas droughts over the past Thousand Years all of these dips below this line represent a severe drought and Texas has a long history of them this light blue section is data from tree ring observations the dark blue is modern data from the past hundred years and it suggests that the droughts are becoming hotter and more severe that has a lot to do with climate change the average temperature in Texas has increased by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the early 1900s and the rate of increase is going up record-breaking temperatures record heat 100 plus Degree Days dangerous heat already turning his store [Music] this year Texas has already hit record temperatures including here in the west Texas city of San Angelo some farmers in this area of Texas deny that human activity is driving climate change but they all agree on one thing things are definitely getting worse this year is definitely different earlier hotter or ready drier jeans Acres of bare cotton fields are some of the clearest proof of the damage a drought can cause when it's this dry we just can't pump enough water to get that crop growing looking out here that's none of these Acres will be harvested usually rain is absorbed into the ground plants and crops soak up the water they need and the rest keeps the soil moist fills up the aquifers and the runoff fills up the Lakes eventually evaporation and plant transpiration release water back into the atmosphere where it becomes precipitation again this is the water cycle that keeps us alive when temperatures are unusually warm this cycle is disrupted plants hold on to their water and transpire less and evaporation from the ground happens too fast together they destabilize a cycle and prolong the lack of rain and while this lack of rain hurts everyone it's farmers who feel it the most some days it is pretty disheartening you look at that [Music] we always want to be a farmer you want to grow a good crop you want to plant it want to get it up we want to grow it nothing more beautiful than waste high cotton but uh it's not going to happen and we know that living here that it doesn't always happen but it is a struggle [Music] but there is a technology that can help protect this cycle it's called cloud seeding and it involves getting the clouds to make more rain so I visited the west Texas weather modification Association one of many organizations around the world that practice cloud seeding and so basically what you do in the sky is you're kind of coaxing the cloud to produce more rain exactly right we're just getting more rain out of a cloud than would otherwise be the case on stormy days Pilots load up small planes with these Special flares full of chemicals like silver iodide and fly to the edge of thunderstorms to launch the flares into the clouds foreign thunderstorm clouds are full of droplets of super cool liquid water meaning they are in freezing temperatures but they are still liquid these drops are too small to freeze and too small to merge they are also too light for Gravity to pull them down so they just float around in the cloud enter silver iodide the silver iodide particles mimic ice crystals and provide the scaffolding of sorts for ice to form that ice then grows very efficiently by consuming the super cool liquid drops usually after about 20 minutes they grow large enough and fall out of the cloud as precipitation more rain means Fuller lakes rivers and aquifers then consistently the hope is that cloud seeding can help Bank water this keeps the soil wet longer and can help protect the water cycle when things get really dry during a drought when we visited Texas there were no thunderstorms in the forecast but local Pilots Derek and Tanner took us up into the sky for a practice run so we could see the process up close we're ready when you are ready oh that is shooting out all the silver iodized it's going into the clouds so that trail is literally the chemicals that there's no chemicals coming out all right let's uh let's head RGB we're gonna be late [Applause] cloud seating technology has been around since the 1940s but proving the effects of cloud seeding on the ground has been a struggle one of the biggest challenges in weather modification is the ability to show statistically that it works how do we know that a cloud wasn't already going to do what it did on a day-to-day basis it's hard to see that but over a 20-year span where we have thousands of seated clouds compared to unseated clouds we're seeing increases of 15 percent other cloud seeding programs have also shown increases in rainfall of about 15 percent but have failed to meet the standards of the scientific community the researchers they would probably prefer that we went to this Cloud rolled dice all right it's odd so let's move on to this Cloud it's an even let's see that we're not able to do that our programs expect every cloud to be seated so we're not able to do the randomized seating that that the scientific Community would like to see but today tests using clouds in snowy mountains are providing further evidence that cloud seeding Works in a 2017 study in Idaho radar footage captured ice crystals forming in the same pattern the cloud seeding airplane was flown in and the snowfall was then tracked on the ground a lot of variables change from the mountains of Idaho to the flats of Texas and thunderstorms are shorter smaller and change faster than snowstorms still the experiment in Idaho has added to a growing body of evidence that cloud seeding works so far researchers have seen few downsides most studies like this one conducted in Wyoming in 2014 have found negligible environmental impact and the cost of flying up a pilot with flares is relatively low especially compared to the value of water in West Texas the program is funded by local water districts and costs just a few cents an acre but even if this technology works it only works when there's already rain in the forecast if we were able to create a cloud out of nowhere there would be no drought so this is definitely rain enhancement Gene's Farm is right outside the cloud seating program's Target area but he wants in can you prove that it helps or it doesn't I don't know but it's better than nothing you can't just sit on your hands to make more rain you know cloud seating is really the only thing out there I brought some of those ideas back here to our coffee shop talking with the guys some of the older farmers and there's some negativity there but uh definitely I think we need to revisit that and it may be time to have the water the cloud seeding man come in and give us a program out here on the flats opposition to cloud seating isn't new in New Mexico for instance some locals have expressed concerns over environmental safety and funding but farmers in the area would have to wait for the next rainy season to start seeing results during the wet years it is very important for us and it's easy to get relaxed during wet years but it's very important for us to stay on our game and be aggressive during those wet Seasons because that's when we Bank our water so we get extra recharge into our aquifer so we get runoff in the lakes rivers and reservoirs around the world droughts are on the rise the UN predicts three quarters of the world's population will be impacted by a drought by 2050. in places like China Europe Australia India where droughts are already worsening cloud seeding programs are in full swing as cloud seeding gains traction we'll learn more about what it can and can't do for us but as I leave the sweltering heat of Texas I can't help but think that to really lessen the damage caused by droughts we need climate change mitigation that means reducing emissions to control the temperature to protect our water cycle as a whole foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Vox

Views: 1,317,139

Keywords: Vox.com, explain, explainer, vox, future perfect, drought, megadrought, texas drought, water cycle, climate change, cloud seeding, weather modification, west texas weather modification, silver iodide, SNOWIE, chemical flares, solutions, climate change solutions, precipitation, thunder storms, weather, climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation, warming climate, science solutions

Id: n3sEl4bB3qU

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022