Company believes drone cloud seeding tech could help restore the Great Salt Lake in the future

SALT LAKE CITY — As the well-publicized woes of the Great Salt Lake continue to deepen with receding water levels within range of all-time lows, a California-based company believes its next-generation cloud seeding technology may be part of the solution in the future.

Rainmaker Technology Corporation and founder Augustus Doricko recently announced the company used its technology to produce 19 million gallons of precipitation over three hours in Alaska.

Doricko said Rainmaker is the only company to "unambiguously and repeatedly" measure how much precipitation is manmade through cloud seeding.

"We use radar, balloons, drone measurements (and) satellite to find clouds with small drops of cold water — too small to naturally precipitate," Doricko explained of Rainmaker's process during an interview with KSL. "Once we found those clouds, we'll fly our drones into them, release a dust that the small drops freeze onto; they grow into big enough snowflakes after they fall and then either remain as snow or melt back into rain."

He also put the 19 million gallons produced in Alaska into perspective.

"When you can only nudge a cloud to lightly precipitate more, drizzle more, maybe have a light to moderate flurry of snow, those 57 acre-feet, that's enough for about 50 to 100 acres of dry land farming consumption for a year. That's enough for hundreds of Americans' household annual consumption."

Doricko said the company was partnering with the Utah Department of Natural Resources and that there were plans in the coming months to use the technology to try to help restore the Great Salt Lake.

"Fifty-seven acre-feet, or 19 million gallons — being able to prove that is a big deal, but Rainmaker now needs to operationalize and scale this tech so we can deliver tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of acre-feet to the Great Salt Lake Basin and help reduce how fast it's evaporating," Doricko said. "I think that if you do a lot of really intelligent conservation work and scale up cloud seeding and dial in the science, you can by the 2030s stop the evaporation of the Great Salt Lake and begin to turn around the state of the Colorado River Basin."

At the Utah Division of Water Resources, meteorologist Jonathan Jennings said the basis for what Rainmaker did in Alaska was based on the SNOWIE campaign in 2017.

He said the company's ability to measure or document the amount of precipitation it produced mattered when it comes to proving return on investment to decision-makers, and it was an intriguing technology to the state.

"Over the course or the span of a decade, two decades, it provides a lot of relief in terms of the stress that we're seeing in our water supplies," Jennings said. "Just to squeeze another 5% or 10% out of the atmosphere is quite a bit and can have a lot of really positive effects here in the state of Utah."

Jennings said the state had done its "homework" on the technology and believed it was safe for people and the environment, and he underscored that the health of the watershed in Utah was of the utmost importance moving forward.

He acknowledged some critics have previously raised concerns about the cumulative effects of the chemical compounds used in cloud seeding operations.

Doricko himself acknowledged the questions raised by the technology.

"Although there are state and federal regulations on cloud seeding, there probably should be more to ensure that if America is going to adopt this technology and if America is going to be the leader in weather modification, rather than China, it has to be done responsibly, it has to be done transparently," Doricko said. "The federal government is probably going to have to hold people to account both as they sell 'snake oil,' because now that Rainmaker has proven it, others are going to try to ride the coattails, and also the federal government should ensure that it's done safely, because you need to know what kind of material you're using, you don't want to put snow on a mountain that has an avalanche risk already. Those types of regulations, I think, are soon to follow."

Doricko said he hoped to answer all questions transparently going forward.

"A mulleted guy from California running a tech company that's going to modify the weather — it's not lost on me that that should raise eyebrows," Doricko said. "It's not lost on me that people have questions. Like, I'm very empathetic to all of the skepticism that people have, but Rainmaker is going to continue being totally transparent, graceful (and) putting our best foot forward in answering these questions, because I believe that this technology is going to reshape the face of the American West for the better."

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