"Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker, surveys the sky from a sunbaked hillside 5 miles from Utah's Great Salt Lake. On this balmy Sunday afternoon in late September, the lake is calm, but its serenity belies a potentially catastrophic problem: The Great Salt Lake is shrinking-and is at risk of disappearing altogether. At its peak 40 years ago, the lake covered 2,300 square miles; today, more than 800 square miles of lake bed are exposed."
"Rainmaker's futuristic technology could solve the state's water woes by harnessing nature. The startup flies drones into the troposphere, where they probe for precipitation-friendly conditions before releasing silver iodide particles that "seed" rain and snow. The weather today is too idyllic for umbrellas. But Doricko's mind, as usual, is in the clouds. "There's hella-supercooled liquid water today between six and nine thousand feet," he says. "So basically, we gotta start blasting.""
The Great Salt Lake has lost significant surface area over four decades, exposing more than 800 square miles of lake bed and risking disappearance. Falling water levels threaten toxic heavy-metal dust storms that could affect the Salt Lake Valley. Rainmaker uses drone-mounted cloud-seeding to increase precipitation by probing the troposphere and dispersing silver iodide particles that nucleate rain and snow. Silver iodide is more effective in colder temperatures, so operators prepare during colder seasons to produce snow that feeds the lake. Trainees practice flights with a custom quadcopter named Elijah and coordinate operations from a laptop command center. Operations focus on basins like the Bear River that feed the Great Salt Lake.
Read at Fast Company
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