Cloud seeding creates rain Northern Nevada needs, Las Vegas wants

Desert Research Institute

Tom Swafford, left, and Bryan Loss dismantle cloud-seeding equipment at Alpine Meadows outside Truckee, Calif. Such dismantling efforts are on hold as the Desert Research Institute, which has operated the cloud-seeding program for years, works with Washoe County to find funding and resuscitate the program.

By Stephanie Tavares (contact)

Monday, Aug. 31, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Chris Morris

For Want of Water: Find video reports, interactive graphics and expanded coverage of Las Vegas' water shortage

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When Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy suggested the agency fund a shuttering Desert Research Institute cloud seeding program, it turned more than a few heads.

The project is vital to a stable water supply in Northern Nevada, but what does it have to do with Southern Nevada?

Well, not much — at least not right now.

The cloud-seeding program provided precipitation to some of the rural ground water basins from which the authority wants to eventually pump water for Las Vegas.

The authority has been involved in the institute’s cloud-seeding program for years — but not in Nevada. It has paid the research institute $121,000 over the past three years to conduct cloud-seeding research and spur precipitation in the mountains between Denver and Grand Junction, Colo. The bill went to the authority’s Enterprise Fund, which gets most of its money from wholesale delivery charges to municipal water agencies.

Because 90 percent of Las Vegas’ drinking water comes from the Colorado River, and because snowmelt from the upper basin has dropped amid the drought, paying for cloud seeding there made sense. In that case, the authority was effectively trying to create its own water.

Cloud seeding means adding chemicals to clouds to induce or increase precipitation. In Nevada that most often involves pumping silver iodide particles into clouds from a remote controlled mountaintop station when the right cloud patterns are present. The silver iodide changes the composition of ultracold water in the clouds, turning the liquid into snow or ice, which then falls to the ground.

Desert Research Institute has 23 cloud-seeding stations in Nevada and six in the Sierra Nevada range along the California-Nevada border. They create about 65,000 acre-feet of precipitation each year in Nevada, mostly in the form of snow, according to institute data.

The institute is a world leader in cloud-seeding research and technology dating to the 1970s. The program developed remote-controlled mountaintop cloud seeding stations used today in Nevada and around the world.

But in this year’s legislative session, funding for the program dried up. With the economy in a shambles and not enough new income, the Legislature made deep cuts in the higher education budget. Desert Research Institute gets only about 15 percent of its budget from the state, but the cuts were felt mainly by the institute’s service-oriented divisions, such as the cloud-seeding program, which get most or all of their funding from state coffers.

The cloud-seeding program is small and appears to have been relatively efficient, with, at most, five highly trained employees with years of experience. Its budget was $550,000 to $600,000 a year, depending on how much cloud seeding took place.

The program served the community in important ways but didn’t bring in many grants or closely align with the core mission of research, institute President Stephen Wells said.

“I don’t have any sources of money to go to keep these parts of DRI functional,” Wells said. “It was a terrible choice I was forced to make.”

How Southern Nevadans might benefit from manipulating precipitation above the Sierra Nevada range and in northeastern Nevada, from which we currently get no water, isn’t as clear.

Las Vegas Valley Water District spokesman J.C. Davis says it all comes down location and timing.

The seeding program increases snowpack by 2 percent to 10 percent, the higher percentages coming in drought years, according to the institute’s figures. When that snowpack melts, some of it recharges the aquifers in the valleys below.

Snake Valley

The water authority owns water rights in four such aquifers between here and White Pine County. It has suspended an application for more water in the fifth, Snake Valley, a ranching community below Great Basin National Park on the Utah border.

Water authority staff members are examining whether it would be in Southern Nevada’s best interest to fund part of the core cloud-seeding program, which would make it possible for the institute to continue seeding above the Colorado River basin while supporting cloud seeding above the basins in which it owns water rights.

Keep the water coming in now, when the drought is at its height, they hypothesize, and you’ve got a better chance of pulling something out of the ground in the future.

Northern Nevada, though, is immediately dependent on that snow. It, like much of the rest of the West, has been hit hard by a multiyear drought. The additional tens of thousands of acre-feet of precipitation created each year by the seeding program has kept ski slopes open and stabilized the region’s aquifers, Washoe County Commissioner John Breternitz said.

“In Northern Nevada we’re hard pressed every winter to have enough water to get by,” he said. “The cloud seeding is an added insurance.”

That’s why Northern Nevada is trying to find ways to pay for it. Breternitz is building a coalition of business owners, politicians and residents to raise money to get the project back up and running.

The institute is preparing reports for the Truckee Meadows Water Authority, Washoe County and the Southern Nevada Water Authority on what it would take to resuscitate the program. It has also ordered its staff to stop dismantling the seeding stations.

“We’re in the ramping up mode where we’re trying to get the word out and see if we can find anyone who can fund it on the interim basis and then find a long-term funding mechanism,” Breternitz said. “The state needs to understand how important this program is to Nevada.”

The water authority’s entrance into the discussion, though, has changed the dialogue. The agency wants to pump tens of thousands of acre-feet of water each year from rural Nevada basins. Most rural Nevadans, including many in areas that depend on cloud seeding, oppose that prospect.

Lake Mead Level

Destined for Dust Bowl?

The Bureau of Land Management is expecting to complete its draft environmental impact statement on the pipeline in early 2010, but construction isn’t likely to begin for several years.

The project faces mounting opposition from ranchers, farmers, environmentalists, American Indians and national parks enthusiasts who say it will suck dry some of the most beautiful country in the state and ruin the lives of local residents.

The authority has acquired water rights in four of the five basins from which it wants water. In Spring Valley, it had to purchase and operate large ranches to get the water it wanted. And it has made deals with Lincoln County to exchange 3,000 acre-feet of water each year for support for its water rights applications there. The agency recently agreed, as part of a water basin agreement between Nevada and Utah, to wait 10 years before pursuing the water rights it applied for in a final basin, Snake Valley.

Pipeline opponents see the cloud-seeding proposition as yet another way the water authority is trying to manipulate rural Nevadans into supporting the pipeline. For them and other pipeline foes, it serves as another “ah ha” moment.

“It appears that the SNWA is acknowledging that there just isn’t enough water in the basins they have targeted, at least if they are going to avoid widespread defoliation and environmental destruction,” said Launce Rake, spokesman for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

Discussion: 7 comments so far…

By saltydawg

8/31/09 at 4:15 a.m.

Suggest removal

If cloud seeding works, why is there a shortage of water?
By Bob635

8/31/09 at 6:05 a.m.

Suggest removal

It is interesting that people are against SNWA's proposal to access northern Nevada's ground water.

The real question here is what are the alternatives?

All is see is nay sayers, yet there are no suggestions on how to solve the problem.

China is building a water channel from the south to the chronic water short north. If they can do it, why do we have a problem? They realize that thousands of years of climate data are sufficient to prove a long term water problem.

Don't we have the same thousand year desert climate data? An alternative water source is needed for LV. The water will also benefit those people down stream to Lake Meade. It will be used over and over.
By Teaser

8/31/09 at 6:58 a.m.

Suggest removal

Hey, which city in Nevada brings in the most tax revenues? Which city in Nevada is being targeted for its property taxes? I don't see people from northern Nevada doing a whole lot of protesting about sucking from the Vegas money spout when it comes to benefitting them. Why should we have any qualms about taking some of the water?
By texexnv

8/31/09 at 9:36 a.m.

Suggest removal

Las Bugsy has been trying for close to 80 years now to morph itself into something it ISN'T - a place built in one of the driest places in the world. Like everything else there, it's all just a glorious illusion.

In the last ten years, Las Bugsy has sucked 100 feet out of Lake Mead and now there's only 20 feet left before that is turned off. You can do the math as to how long the sand timer has left before the golf courses go brown, the swimming pools dry up, and everyone moves on.

The only infinite source of water in the world is the ocean - NOT the parched deserts of eastern Nevada/western Utah. But it's too late for that. In 100 years Las Bugsy will become the most interesting archaeological site there is too roam around in. Just don't forget to bring your own water; the free drinks and free ride will be long over waaaay before then.
By lvsunv06

8/31/09 at 11:12 a.m.

Suggest removal

fyi,the reason these chemical happy blind idiots don't have more funding is because cloud seeding was PROVEN to be disastrous and harmful.
Re: Cloud seeding/water issue/environment, not a solution.
This weather manipulation was banned during the Vietnam War, for extremely good reasons; CONSEQUENCE. Action and Reaction.
Anything humanity is arrogant enough to think is so easy to fix, just Simple Logic pertaining to Nature, is NOT; there are ALWAYS more ramifications and consequences; MORE ripples in the pond that our limited human thought processes do not and cannot EVER comprehend, not to mention poisoning our environment, our water, our air, our health.
By Babyboomer

9/1/09 at 5:24 p.m.

Suggest removal

what exactly is in the "Seeding" that is so harmful? Obviously LVSUNV06...knows but isn't saying.
By mcohen

9/2/09 at 10:28 a.m.

Suggest removal

Unfortunately, this article's a bit weak on fact-finding.

A quick look at DRI's website shows that the precise 65,000 acre-feet per year volume cited above is not warranted by DRI's own research, which suggests that cloud-seeding might only add 20,000 acre-feet of additional precipitation to the total for the state as a whole. How much of that precipitation actually benefits water users in the form of increased run-off that can be captured downstream? Fifty percent? If so, then the supposed 65,000 acre-feet might actually only be 10,000 acre-feet per year of increased streamflow.

Interestingly, the article also fails to ask about the impacts of cloud-seeding down wind. Is cloud-seeding a zero-sum game? That is, if precipitation falls due to the cloud-seeding, does that mean there's less precipitation farther east? Does that mean that SNWA's funding for this program might mean (slightly) more precip in northern Nevada, at the expense of less precip in Utah or maybe even in the Colorado River basin as a whole? That is, is SNWA funding an effort that might actually reduce the amount of water that flows into Lake Mead?

Maybe the next article on DRI's cloud-seeding program will ask some relevant questions.

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