Overnight from July 3rd - 4th, moisture surged into the Hill Country from the Pacific as remnants of Tropical Storm Barry moved across the region.
At 1:00 a.m. on July 4th, the National Weather Service (NWS), which we work closely with to maintain awareness of severe weather systems, issued a flash flood warning for San Angelo, Texas. Note, summer convective cloud seeding operations in Texas do not occur during overnight hours.
At 4:00 a.m. on July 4th, the NWS issued a life-threatening emergency warning, and flooding ensued.
Did Rainmaker conduct any operations that could have impacted the floods? No.
The last seeding mission prior to the July 4th event was during the early afternoon of July 2nd, when a brief cloud seeding mission was flown over the eastern portions of south-central Texas, and two clouds were seeded. These clouds persisted for about two hours after seeding before dissipating between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. CDT. Natural clouds typically have lifespans of 30 minutes to a few hours at most, with even the most persistent storm systems rarely maintaining the same cloud structure for more than 12-18 hours. The clouds that were seeded on July 2nd dissipated over 24 hours prior to the developing storm complex that would produce the flooding rainfall.
A senior meteorologist observed an unusually high moisture content prior to the event's arrival, using NWS sounding data. It was at this point that our meteorologists determined that we would suspend future operations indefinitely. As you can see, we suspended operations on July 2nd, a day before the NWS issued any flood warning.
Here are the flight logs for July from our South Texas Program
To ensure safety and prevent any risk of flooding from cloud seeding, Rainmaker suspended operations in accordance with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulations suspension criteria, listed below
I encourage the meteorology community to ask questions and scrutinize our claims, and we will continue to be fully transparent in answering.
Attached is a meteorological report on the events.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Announcing Rainmaker’s $25M Series A lead by Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from Naval Ravikant, Acequia Capital, Drover Ventures, Sovereigns Cap and others
We have begun nextgen precipitation enhancement operations across the US to make rain, snow and green deserts🧵
Cloud seeding was invented in America in 1946, its promise was to make rain and snow for water supply, someday mitigating severe weather
But, proving that it worked was generally too difficult. “Would that cloud have rained naturally, hadn’t you seeded it?”
Rainmaker has built the first generation of an end-to-end cloud seeding system that can target seedable clouds, seed them, and attribute how much precipitation is man-made
This thread is fairly high level, will post detailed tech specific threads later
Cloud seeding locally and temporarily enhances precipitation
Dispersing certain minerals into clouds with favorable conditions, condenses or freezes small, naturally occurring water droplets into drops or snowflakes big enough to precipitate
2/
Does it work?
Yeah, was hard to prove for a long time but the SNOWIE project used high resolution radar to measure increased precipitation exclusively in the track of their seeding plane
Each of those lines is millions of gallons of snowmelt!
3/
How many nuclear bombs would it take to build a mountain in Kansas?
When people discuss terraforming or geoengineering, they're usually referring to atmospheric interventions – but what would it take to create new earthen formations?
Can we engineer geography?
1/11
I'm not the first to think of terraforming w nukes
In the 60s the United States had Project Plowshare: an initiative to investigate using nuclear explosives for construction purposes
There was a proposal to build a new deep water harbor in Alaska with 5 hydrogen bombs
2/
The USSR had the Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program
A fine example of their work is Atomic Lake, also known as Lake Chagan
They built this beautiful reservoir with a single 140 kiloton bomb
Full of fish too
Future 🧵how many nukes to end water scarcity? 🤔 3/