There are about 100 cloud seeding generators in Colorado, serving to provide powder to resorts and snowpack leading to stream flows for irrigation, wildlife and recreation, said Joe Busto, chair of the North American Interstate Weather Modification Council.
He said cloud seeding can increase precipitation by up to 10 percent. The seeding procedure common to this area involves burning silver in powder form over a flame. The particles released in the smoke mix with water vapor in the clouds above, stimulating ice crystal growth and snowflakes.
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Don Griffith, president of North American Weather Consultants, said the plateau would be a good place for a generator.
“Storms (are mostly) coming out of the southwest, so air forced right over the plateau forces clouds to form,” Griffith said.
A report from Bureau of Reclamation in April 2006 lists the plateau as a “potential target area.”
Both Busto and Griffith said the environmental impacts are negligible according to research dating back to the 1950s.
Busto said Colorado’s last cloud seeding program started in Gunnison County in 2003. He’s part of the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s watershed protection and flood mitigation section, an office that issues cloud seeding permits and allocates grants to help finance such projects.
He said a generator costs about $60,000.
Griffith said the grant assistance the state provides was low until the past few years. He said the Gunnison County program, which he helped start, costs the county about 60 percent with the remainder covered by state grants.
Busto said Vail and Beaver Creek are the state’s only resorts to bring in cloud seeding, as most are facilitated by municipalities and water users.
“Basically locals say, ‘We think cloud seeding would be helpful,’ then a feasibility study is done,” he said.
Griffith, who helped Gunnison County get started, said the initial emphasis for cloud seeding was agriculture and that the emphasis continues to be with agriculture and municipalities rather than ski resorts.
Mike Chamberlain of the National Weather Service in Grand Junction said the impacts of cloud seeding aren’t on a scale significant enough to impact forecasts.
“We don’t know much about it, we don’t know when they do it and we don’t know where (they) do it.”
Telluride Ski Resort has received more than 25 feet of snow this season, according to its Web site.
Busto said the impressive snowfall “was natural,” and that Crested Butte and Telluride have ceased cloud seeding because their basins’ snowpack levels have exceeded 140 percent of their 30-year averages. The generators are required to be stopped based on such levels as well as notifications from the Colorado Avalanche Information Center and the Colorado Department of Transportation.
With regard to the seeding’s affect on neighboring regions, Busto said:
“There’s probably some small downwind affect — there’s gotta be.”
But he said it’s small.
“It would be hard to make the leap that you’re draining clouds out just trying to make snowflakes,” he said.
Contact Robert Allen via e-mail at roberta@montrosepress.com
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