One of the most prominent examples has been in parts of Canada, where hailstorms can be devastating; a 2024 event in Calgary, for instance, was the country’s second-most-expensive disaster ever, with over $2 billion in damages.
Insurance companies in Alberta have been working together for nearly three decades on a cloud seeding program that’s aimed at reducing some of that damage. In these cases, the silver iodide or other particles are meant to act essentially as competition for other “embryos” inside the cloud, increasing the total number of hailstones and thus reducing each individual stone’s average size.
Smaller hailstones means less damage when they reach the ground. The insurance companies—which continue to pay for the program—say losses have been cut by 50% since the program started, though scientists aren’t quite as confident in its overall success. A 2023 study published in Atmospheric Research examined 10 years of cloud seeding efforts in the province and found that the practice did appear to reduce potential for damage in about 60% of seeded storms—while in others, it had no effect or was even associated with increased hail (though the authors said this could have been due to natural variation).
Similar techniques are also sometimes deployed to try to improve the daily forecast just a bit. During the 2008 Olympics, for instance, China engaged in a form of cloud seeding aimed at reducing rainfall. As MIT Technology Review detailed back then, officials with the Beijing Weather Modification Office planned to use a liquid-nitrogen-based coolant that could increase the number of water droplets in a cloud while reducing their size; this can get droplets to stay aloft a little longer instead of falling out of the cloud. Though it is tough to prove that it definitively would have rained without the effort, the targeted opening ceremony did stay dry.
So, where is this happening?
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization says that some form of weather modification is taking place in “more than 50 countries” and that “demand for these weather modification activities is increasing steadily due to the incidence of droughts and other calamities.”
The biggest user of cloud-seeding tech is arguably China. Following the work around the Olympics, the country announced a huge expansion of its weather modification program in 2020, claiming it would eventually run operations for agricultural relief and other functions, including hail suppression, over an area about the size of India and Algeria combined. Since then, China has occasionally announced bits of progress—including updates to weather modification aircraft and the first use of drones for artificial snow enhancement. Overall, it spends billions on the practice, with more to come.
Elsewhere, desert countries have taken an interest. In 2024, Saudi Arabia announced an expanded research program on cloud seeding—Delene, of the University of North Dakota, was part of a team that conducted experiments in various parts of that country in late 2023. Its neighbor the United Arab Emirates began “rain enhancement” activities back in 1990; this program too has faced outcry, especially after more than a typical year’s worth of rain fell in a single day in 2024, causing massive flooding. (Bloomberg recently published a story about persistent questions regarding the country’s cloud seeding program; in response to the story, French wrote in an email that the “best scientific understanding is still that cloud seeding CANNOT lead to these types of events.” Other experts we asked agreed.)
In the US, a 2024 Government Accountability Office report on cloud seeding said that at least nine states have active programs. These are sometimes run directly by the state and sometimes contracted out through nonprofits like the South Texas Weather Modification Association to private companies, including Doricko’s Rainmaker and North Dakota–based Weather Modification. In August, Doricko told me that Rainmaker had grown to 76 employees since it launched in 2023. It now runs cloud seeding operations in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California, and Texas, as well as forecasting services in New Mexico and Arizona. And in an answer that may further fuel the conspiracy fire, he added they are also operating in one Middle Eastern country; when I asked which one, he’d only say, “Can’t tell you.”