Georgetown Law
Technology Review

Long has humanity sought the ability to control the weather. For millennia, different cultures from all around the world have performed prayers, rain dances, sacrifices, and other rituals to attempt to conjure precipitation for their communities. While some of these practices persist in our modern times, a new one has emerged in the last century: cloud seeding. This is humanity’s latest attempt at mantling the truly chaotic system that is the planet’s weather, venturing away from the supernatural to the scientific. Cloud seeding has likely had some positive effect, and with the growing trends of droughts, forest fires, cloudless skies, and many more devastating weather events brought on by human-caused climate change, it is paramount that we explore our options to combat the negatives.1 One such option with some promise is cloud seeding.

This Technology Explainer is divided into three Parts: Section I is dedicated to an explanation of the science behind clouds and rain, and Section II is dedicated to an overview of the three main types of cloud seeding. Understanding how precipitation comes about is incredibly important for making sense of cloud seeding as a technology, because the idea of artificial intervention is to exploit natural processes, thereby making the technology itself somewhat intuitive. There are three main types of cloud seeding: hygroscopic, static, and dynamic, all of which have some practical limitations and different typical uses. The Explainer closes with limitations of cloud seeding, and the future outlook of this technology.

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