Cloud Seeding to Enhance Precipitation June 15, 2024

June 15, 2024Posted inweatherNo Comments

Global Warming and Population Growth, create a need for more Water.

There are a number of different ways to address a shortage of water:

  1. Get equal value from less water  (Conservation)

  2. Find more water from surface and groundwater  sources

  3. Have more precipitation (Increase the velocity of water)

In this article, we discuss “Finding More Water by Using Cloud Seeding to Increase Precipitation”.

Last Saturday we published an article based on a talk by Dr. Bruce M. Thomson, Regents Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of New Mexico. He gave a very good presentation on obtaining more water from brackish water, oilfield water, and importing water. You can access that article HERE.

Let us get started with today’s article on using cloud seeding to increase precipitation.

Weather modification with cloud seeding was discovered by General Electric at the Schenectady New York Laboratory.  Initially, on July 14, 1946, they used Dry Ice. Of course, prior to that time, there were other attempts at increasing precipitation

Cloud seeding can be used for three different purposes:  Precipitation enhancement, Hail suppression and fog dispersal.  In this article, I am focusing on precipitation enhancement.

Some will need to click on “Read More” to access the full article.

Non-Conventional Water Resources – Surface and Subsurface Sources – Posted on June 8, 2024

June 8, 2024Posted ineconomicsNo Comments

Global Warming and Population Growth, create a need for more Water.

There are a number of different ways to address a shortage of water:

  1. Get equal value from less water  (Conservation)

  2. Find more water from surface and groundwater  sources

  3. Have more precipitation (Increase the velocity of water)

In this article, we discuss “Finding More Water from Surface Water and Groundwater.

Recently, Dr. Bruce M. Thomson, Regents Professor of Civil Engineering gave a very good presentation on this approach. Dr. Thompson gave me permission to write an article on his presentation with my comments, which are mostly explanatory, in boxes.

Let us get started.

Bruce is pretty pessimistic that most alternative water sources will play a meaningful contribution to the hole in the budget that we anticipate due to global warming.  I tend to agree with him but not totally. He provides a strong argument for his conclusion but I think there may be important niches and separately I will discuss cloud seeding which is widely used in the U.S. West and around the World. I really appreciate the thorough analysis provided by Professor Thomson.

 Bruce covers the major alternative water sources that we think of in the inland West other than cloud seeding which I will cover in a separate article.  Many of the sources that Bruce covers involve chemical processing to reclaim the water. I think Dr. Thomson is a civil engineer and a very good one. To have the analysis be real many of the calculations are based on the water being available in Albuquerque NM but the calculation for other locations would be similar but not identical.  In the West, we use Acre-feet as a measure i.e. the amount of water to flood an acre one foot deep or 325 851 US Gallon. For stream flows we use cubic feet per second which if sustained for a year would be 723.97 af.

Some will need to click on “Read More” to access the body of this article which is extremely interesting.