A cloud-seeding startup did not cause the Texas floods

In the wake of a disaster, it is not uncommon for people to search for answers anywhere they can find. The destroyed floods in Texas are not an exception.

There are many possible reasons for killing many people because of the fast rising water, but the reasons that some people settled are a practice known as cloud sowing. They claim that the start of the cloud known as Rainmaker caused the storm to decrease more rain than it was. However, the data does not support their fears.

The air maker was working in that area a few days before the storm, but despite the gossip over the Internet, “cloud sowing was not what it was doing” with the floods.

“It is just a complete conspiracy theory. Someone is looking for someone who blames,” Bob Robert, a professor of science at the University of Illinois, told Techcrunch.

Cloud sowing is not a new thing. Roll said he had been practiced since the fifties of the last century. It works by spraying small molecules in the clouds, usually made of silver yoisal.

Silver molecules mimic the shape of ice crystals, so when you collide with preliminary water drops-water that remains liquid under the freezing point-they lead to the freezing of drops to the ice. Roll said this freezing is important. Ice crystals grow faster than the superficial water drops, which means that they are more likely to capture enough water vapor to become large enough to fall from the cloud. If they have superior principled water, there is a good opportunity to evaporate in the end.

Only the clouds that have a sufficient amount of super refrigerator water are good candidates for cloud sowing.

In the United States, most cloud sowing occur in the winter near the mountain ranges in the West. There, the clouds form as the mountains pushed the air up, causing it to cool and intensify the water vapor. If these clouds are properly manufactured, these clouds will launch some of these water, such as snow, which is then kept as a snowy saving, and forms a natural tank, during the melting of the spring, which renovates the artificial tanks behind the dams.

Although people were planting clouds for decades, its effect on rain is a newer field of study. “We have not truly had the techniques to evaluate them until recently,” said Robert.

In early 2017, Friedrich, Robert, and their colleagues created a store in Idahu to perform one of the most detailed studies of cloud sowing so far. On three occasions, they planted withdrawals for two hours and 10 minutes. It was sufficient to add about 186 million gallons of additional rain.

This may seem much, and for dehydration western craftsmen, it can make a difference. IDaho seeds are many clouds throughout the winter to enhance the amount of water collected behind their dams so that they can generate electricity throughout the year. “Their data shows that it is costly to them,” said Roll.

But compared to a large storm, 186 million gallons are peanuts. “When we talk about that huge storm that occurred with the flood [in Texas]We are literally talking about an atmosphere of trillion gallons of water.

If Rainmaker affected the storm, it was so little that it was hardly an approximation. But the reality is, he did not.

For beginners, the company was sowing the nearby clouds days before hitting the storm. “The air that crossed that area two days ago was somewhere over Canada by the time when the storm fell,” said Robbish.

Second, it is not clear whether cloud sowing is effective in the cumulative clouds that occur in Texas in the summer. It is distinct from the row clouds that are formed near mountain ranges, and does not respond to the same thing to cloud sowing. For one of them, they tend to be short -term and do not produce a lot of rain.

Roll said the cloud seeds may try to persuade them more anyway, but “the amount of rain that comes out of these seized clouds is small.”

Those that last for a long time? He said: “Deep clouds, like thunderstorms, are the natural processes well.” “These clouds are very effective. The seed of these clouds will not do anything.”