The Nevada State Cloud Seeding Program

As a form of weather modification, cloud seeding is aimed at stimulating snowfall in selected mountainous regions of Nevada to increase the snowpack, resulting in more spring runoff and water supplies in the surrounding areas.

The Nevada State Cloud Seeding Program is operated by the Desert Research Institute Division of Atmospheric Sciences, located in the Northern Nevada Science Center (NNSC), Reno, Nevada. The State program originated as an outgrowth of DRI weather modification research programs funded through USBR and NOAA.

Current DRI research is focused on the quantitative evaluation of winter storm cloud seeding using trace chemistry, atmospheric model simulations of seeding plume transport, and hydrologic modeling to estimate the additional runoff due to cloud seeding.