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Officials in India’s capital, Delhi, are seeking permission to seed clouds with salts to trigger artificial rain — a move they hope could reduce high levels of pollution that blanket the region every year.
Daniele Visioni
Assistant Professor, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Daniele Visioni is a climate scientist at Cornell University specializing in geoengineering, or climate interventions. Visioni can speak to the efficacy and limitations of cloud seeding, as well as his research focus: sunlight reflection methods such as adding aerosols to the stratosphere to cool the Earth.
Visioni says:
“Cloud seeding as a technology can, at most, slightly increase precipitation under certain conditions. It can’t create rain where there is no moisture in the air, but it just ‘forces’ some of the water to condense in one location rather than another. Understanding its efficacy is hard, as rainfall is inherently very variable. Therefore, it’s hard to tell if it wouldn’t have rained anyway even without seeding.
“In the U.S., cloud seeding has been demonstrated to have some degree of efficacy only under certain conditions, and mostly for snow production.
“In general, there is only one thing that can sensibly reduce pollution: avoiding the burning of fossil fuels.”
