With the weather people forecasting an El Nino-induced drought of biblical and generational proportions for the southern hemisphere this coming rainy season, nobody will be against some benevolent tampering with the skies if it means we can get some life-saving precipitation.
And drone technology may go some way into helping with that.
And a California, USA-based company may not be thinking about Africa right now, but they have reportedly been using drone technology to try and literally make it rain through cloud seeding.
Aptly called Rainmaker, a startup that got an early boost from billionaire businessman Peter Thiel, is updating cloud seeding technology by using drones and AI-enhanced weather modelling to do this with more precision. The company’s is to use vastly expanded data collection and a fleet of drones piloted from the ground to make rainmaking more efficient, measurable and dependable.
With headquarters at El Segundo in California, the company claims it produced nineteen million US gallons of water (nearly 72 million litres) in the sky in three hours, in an experiment carried out in Alaska in August this year.
The practice of cloud seeding, now more than 80-years-old, involves using planes – drones in this case – to disperse compounds such as silver iodide into clouds to form ice crystals. Those crystals eventually become large enough to fall as rain or snow, depending on the temperatures below.
Essentially, cloud seeding speeds up the natural process of water vapor condensing inside of clouds. Gravity then pulls those crystals to the ground.
Traditionally, cloud-seeding operations flew planes into clouds and used flares that contained silver iodide. Invented in 1946 by General Electric scientists in upstate New York, cloud seeding works because silver iodide particles resemble ice crystals. Very small water droplets in clouds freeze onto them and form snowflakes heavy enough to fall to the ground.
When the temperature is warm enough on the ground that results in rain. Many studies have found that the small amount of silver iodide used doesn’t damage the environment.
But cloud seeding using manned planes requires having pilots on standby, which is costly, and the pilots often have to fly into rough or dangerous weather, making the entire process a not very precise one.
Seeing this, Rainmaker founder Augustus Doricko and his team developed their own aerosol dispersal system, which avoids flares and the additional chemicals they produce, and targets specific clouds with the right atmospheric conditions with a fleet of nimble drones.
They first tried out their system publicly around the Great Salt Lake in Utah, whose water levels have been receding to worrying depths in recent times. To gather the advanced weather data, they erected twelve remote weather stations around the Bear River Basin, which feeds the Great Salt Lake, erected twelve-foot metal contraptions with sensors that measure wind speed, direction, temperature, humidity and pressure.
They use K band radar, longwave infrared cameras to sense temperature and LiDAR, which uses lasers, to measure water and ice in clouds.
The sensors also have an aerosol probe that measures particulate matter, because dust helps with snowflake formation.
Rainmaker also uses data from satellites and National Weather Service radar, and it is working to automate its weather modelling with Atmo, an AI-weather forecasting company.
The technology, though, relies on ideal climate environments, such as mountainous or cold regions such as Alaska.
According to the company, the process begins with a cloud selection engine that integrates NOAA weather feeds and Doppler radar data to identify clouds suitable for seeding. (Since July 2025, the system has also incorporated deep-learning weather forecasts from partner Atmo to improve targeting precision).
The drone responsible for the actual flight to the cloud is called Elijah. Each Elijah drone is equipped with dual dispersion systems: traditional burn-in-place flare racks for research purposes and the proprietary aerosol atomiser capable of spraying 50-100 grams of silver iodide per flight. Anti-icing heaters and ruggedised airframes enable the drones to operate within supercooled cloud volumes, where they precisely meter seeding particles.
Following particle release, Rainmaker validates outcomes using the ground-based phased-array radar, called Eden (well, the company founder is religious so…), and onboard drone sensors to measure reflectivity changes and calculate incremental precipitation.
Customers access a dashboard displaying real-time drone telemetry, seeded versus control cell comparisons, and cumulative acre-feet of water added. Post-mission PDF reports are automatically generated within 24 hours to meet state reporting requirements.
Currently, Rainmaker operates in states such as Idaho, Utah, Colorado and areas of the Middle East such as Jordan.
"Jordan residents often only have water for hours per week from their utility because of how scarce water is, and it's a privilege to try to help this storied region," Doricko says.
Water security is a problem that seems to be spreading well beyond just Jordan though. Across the world, there is substantial concerns that fresh water is becoming scarcer and scarcer, and the imminent threat of a debilitating drought in one half of the world will not help the situation.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in July the world is using freshwater faster than it can be replenished, which echoes reports noting how the past five years have led to the driest period for global rivers in more than three decades.
Faced with the danger of the latent famine that always accompanies drought years, some cultures in southern Africa have been known to gather for traditional ceremonies where they offered some sacrifices to the ancestors in exchange for some good rains.
In a way, such ceremonies are a prayer of sorts, and we all know how prayers go: sometimes they are answered, sometimes they are not.
As a science, cloud is more precise and works to ensure that answers lean more on the positive. But as a response to drought, cloud-seeding technology by itself may be a drop in the bucket, as it does not create rainstorms.
For instance, Rainmaker’s 19 million gallons equates to around 0.01 inch of rain across 100 square miles.
Wat could go wrong?
Still, more than 50 countries are developing programmes to modify the weather and a surge of start-ups are developing systems to create rain.
As well developed and promising as this innovative field has become, cloud seeding continues to face thorny questions on safety and efficacy, leading to novel approaches with both finding the right material to spray into clouds and how they do it.
And not only that; the controversy and noise against cloud seeding and weather modification has come from some of the very people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of such systems. You’d think that – after a drought – people would be grateful for any effort by the government to make it rain; but you’d be wrong.
Take the US for example, Rainmaker’s home base, where supposedly intelligent people, who think their government faked a moon landing in 1969, also hold the theory that their government is using cloud seeding as one of the ways to manipulate the weather and control its people.
To be fair though, in this, at least the people have a basis for their concerns: in its coverage of Rainmaker and the community issues it was experiencing in Utah last December, the Wall Street Journal pointed out how believers point to past efforts by the federal government, whose military used cloud seeding during the Vietnam War in a classified project called Operation Popeye, to try to gain an advantage by extending the monsoon season, according to the State Department.
In two other decades-old projects, the government tried but failed to manipulate hurricanes using cloud seeding, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Would you blame the people when they start believing that their government might want to use the same tactics again?
Doricko told the Journal that he has received death threats and been confronted on the street by people who believe he’s part of such a plot — or an unwitting vessel at best. The head of Utah’s cloud-seeding program has also been targeted with threats.
A small but growing faction of Americans believes the government and companies that collaborate with it are spraying toxic chemicals from jets, creating white “chemtrails”—a play on the “contrails” produced by the condensation of exhaust from jets—to poison the population or for other nefarious purposes.
A related theory holds that the government is secretly releasing chemicals to block the sun and fight climate change, a distortion of a concept known as “geoengineering.”
This conspiracy gained traction in the US in July last year, when floods killed more than 130 people in the Texas Hill Country, and somebody online pointed out that Rainmaker was responsible for the tragedy, since it had seeded clouds 150 miles away two days earlier.
Michael Flynn, the retired general who was a short-term national security adviser in President Donald Trump’s first administration and who has previously been on record saying the government manipulates hurricanes, demanded Rainmaker explain itself to his 2.2 million followers on X.
Within days, (then) Georgia congress representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would introduce a bill to ban weather modification.
“I’m accepting apologies now,” she wrote in a post on X, which included a photo of Doricko.
“People have had enough of chemicals manipulating our weather.”
The company came face to face with the same situation in Alaska in August, where Cooper Freeman, the Alaska director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said he had no idea clouds above his head were being filled with a silver compound in order to cause rainfall on August 23.
Neither did thousands of other residents in Homer, Alaska, who expressed concern that the government can allow for these experiments to go on without warning the local community.
Cooper said he was sceptical about what was shot into the clouds, and questioned how safe it was for both residents and their habitat.
“It doesn’t appear that there was any downstream monitoring to verify that this silver iodide didn’t impact the environment,” he said.
“Having a company come in to do this seeding isn’t going to solve our water woes, and it feels like a distraction from solving the urgent issues related to water conservation.”
Doricko has been quick to answer any questions on the consequences of how his company uses the silver iodide compound. It's clear he's been asked about chemical safety many times. He has made appearances on many a podcast and broadcast programmes in the communities his companies has worked in, trying to allay fears of a sinister government plot.
He says Rainmaker releases this form of silver at 20 grams per flight, distributed across thousands of square kilometres.
"The resultant increase in concentration on the ground is in the parts per quadrillion, way below the threshold laid out by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] on what is allowable."
Rainmaker's flights use drones to soar into clouds because without clouds, "we can't do anything," he says, pointing to one of the key limits of cloud-seeding processes: Cloud-seeding sessions have to wait for clouds to form to try to coax them into precipitation.
The Great Salt Lake in Crisis
For Rainmaker, Utah presented the perfect proving ground: a region desperate for water, and with a long history of cloud seeding. Many local farmers and ranchers have relied on seeding for decades.
The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, and Utah state officials are trying to get farmers to cut back on water usage to let more flow into the lake.
But the lake has continued receding, and as it dries up, a rise in arsenic-laden dust, from miles of exposed lake bed, is becoming a growing health risk.
Utah increased its annual cloud-seeding budget to $5 million in 2023 from $350,000 the prior year. It runs the nation’s biggest such program, with 187 ground generators that send silver iodide into clouds.
It contracted with Rainmaker to see how much more water the company could pull from the sky.
“Cloud seeding isn’t a short-term solution to anything. It’s a long-term water management tool that has great impacts over decades,” said Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist with the Utah Division of Water Resources.
Jennings, who heads the state cloud-seeding program, estimates it produces an acre-foot of water, or about 325,000 gallons, for $30, compared with more than $1,000 to produce the same amount with recycling or desalination. Over a decade, he said, cloud seeding can deliver an additional year’s worth of water in a given area.
In 2024, Jennings hosted a demonstration of cloud-seeding equipment at an event he called “Cocoa and Cloud Seeding” to educate state officials.
And as you might expect with public events, one YouTube content creator came across a writeup of the event and connected two and two together. In no time, Jennings was receiving death threats, getting his home address doxxed and saw his private Instagram account overrun with attacks.
“It sucked all the energy out of me,” he said.
“Luckily, any time I get around the Rainmaker guys they reignite the passion I have.”
When Utah considered a geoengineering bill this year, lawmakers excluded cloud seeding.
Some citizens remain wary of cloud seeding, though including Lydia Nuttall, who testified in favour of the state’s failed bill. “When you mess with Mother Nature, there are some things beyond our control,” said Nuttall, who works part time as a podcast host.
She belongs to Utah Skywatch, a Facebook group where she posts photos of what she believes are chemtrails.
“EPA, shm-EPA,” she said of the agency’s explanation of contrails.
Cloud seeding's roots began in 1946 when researchers from the General Electric Research Laboratory used dry ice as the first seeding agent. A year later, silver iodide was found to be more effective than dry ice, which quickly turns into useless gas.
While seeding agents caused more rainfall, they didn't move the needle much. In fact, sobering statistics point to how patchy this technology can be in what it pours on the ground.
"With the right conditions, cloud seeding can squeeze out about an extra five to ten percent of precipitation," says Jon Meyer, an assistant state climatologist with the Utah Climate Centre.
What was encouraging, though, for the cloud-seeding sector was a landmark 2017 study that found how silver iodide worked as expected, one of the first reports to observe cloud seeding in action using radar and precipitation gauges.
In the past several years, Meyer says he has been encouraged to see more companies such as Rainmaker bring innovation to an old industry.
"Drones present this new avenue, and they offer a more targeted nature to these clouds we hope will be responsive," he says
What is sprayed into clouds may also be undergoing a major shift. Recast Systems in San Francisco is experimenting with a type of protein made from amino acids found in the soil, according to its CEO, Olivia Li.
While still undergoing tests at Texas A&M University, this new seeding agent moves Recast away from silver iodide as the go-to compound.
"It's safe, biodegradable and nucleates ice at a higher efficiency than silver iodide," says Li, whose company currently uses silver iodide to seed clouds in several US states.
Meyer is optimistic this technology's trajectory will only continue to rise. "We're going to see more demand for these services as so many regions are experiencing water demand," he says, "and they're going to be looking for ways to help bridge that gap."