For decades this region in West Texas has been pummeled with droughts.
Reservoirs and lakes often sit almost empty.
Grass has gone brown.
And crops are struggling.
Last rain was in October. We went through all the winter months with no rain.
Our cotton, as you can see, none of it came up.
Every acre of our cotton just about is on bare soil.
That's bone dry.
In the heat of Texas, things can sometimes look bleak.
But what if I told you that there's a way to help fix this problem...
"flight ready for takeoff" ...by flying into the clouds and making them rain.
This graph shows T exas droughts over the past thousand years.
All of these dips below this line represent a severe drought.
And texas has a long history of them.
This light blue section is data from tree ring observations.
The dark blue is modern data from the past hundred years and it suggests that
the droughts are becoming hotter and more severe.
That has a lot to do with climate change.
The average temperature in texas has increased by about
1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the early 1900s.
And the rate of increase is going up.
Record-breaking temperatures.
Record heat.
100 plus degree days.
Dangerous heat already turning historic.
This year, Texas has already hit record temperatures including here,
in the West Texas city of San Angelo.
Some farmers in this area of Texas deny that human activity is driving climate change.
But they all agree on one thing: things are definitely getting worse.
This year is definitely different. Earlier, hotter, already drier.
Gene's acres of bare cotton fields are some of the clearest proof of the damage a drought can cause.
When it's this dry we just can't pump enough water to get that crop growing.
Looking out here, none of these acres will be harvested.
Usually, rain is absorbed into the ground.
Plants and crops soak up the water they need and the rest keeps the
soil moist fills up the aquifers and the runoff fills up the lakes.
Eventually evaporation and plant transpiration release water back
into the atmosphere where it becomes precipitation again.
This is the water cycle that keeps us alive.
When temperatures are unusually warm this cycle is disrupted.
Plants hold on to their water and transpire less and evaporation from the ground happens too fast.
Together they destabilize the cycle and prolong the lack of rain.
And while this lack of rain hurts everyone it's farmers who feel it the most.
Some days it is pretty disheartening you look at that.
We always want to be a farmer. You want to grow a good crop.
You want to plant it. We want to get it up.
We want to grow it.
Nothing more beautiful than waist-high cotton but it's not going to happen.
And we know that living here that it doesn't always happen.
But it is a struggle.
But there is a technology that can help protect this cycle.
It's called "cloud seeding" and it involves getting the clouds to make more rain.
So I visited the West Texas Weather Modification Association.
One of many organizations around the world that practice cloud seeding.
And so basically what you do in the sky is,
you're kind of coaxing the cloud to produce more rain, right?
Exactly right we're just getting more rain out of out of a cloud than would otherwise be the case.
On stormy days pilots load up small planes with
these special flares full of chemicals like silver iodide
and fly to the edge of thunderstorms to launch the flares into the clouds.
Thunderstorm clouds are full of droplets of super cool liquid water meaning they
are in freezing temperatures but they are still liquid.
These drops are too small to freeze and too small to merge.
They are also too light for gravity to pull them down so they just float around in the cloud.
Enter silver iodide.
The silver iodide particles mimic ice crystals and provide a scaffolding of sorts for ice to form.
That ice then grows very efficiently by consuming the super cool liquid drops.
Usually, after about 20 minutes they grow large enough and fall out of the cloud as precipitation.
More rain means fuller lakes rivers and aquifers.
Done consistently the hope is that cloud seeding can help bank water.
This keeps the soil wet longer and can help protect the water
cycle when things get really dry during a drought.
When we visited Texas there were no thunderstorms in the forecast
but local pilots Derek and Tanner took us up into the sky for a practice run
so we could see the process up close.
All right we're ready when you are.
Ready.
Woah.
That is shooting out all the silver iodide that's going into the clouds.
So that trail is literally the chemicals...
The chemicals coming out.
All right let's uh let's head RTB.
We are going to be landing in 18.
Cloud seeding technology has been around since the 1940s.
But proving the effects of cloud seeding on the ground has been a struggle.
One of the biggest challenges in weather modification is the
ability to show statistically that it works.
How do we know that a cloud wasn't already going to do what it did?
On a day-to-day basis, it's hard to see that but over a 20-year span
where we have thousands of seeded clouds compared to unseeded clouds
we're seeing increases of 15 percent.
Other cloud-seeding programs have also shown increases in rainfall of about 15.
But have failed to meet the standards of the scientific community.
The researchers, they would probably prefer that we went to this cloud
rolled dice all right it's odd so let's move on to this cloud it's an even let's seed it.
We're not able to do that. Our programs expect every cloud to be seeded so we're not able to
do the randomized seating that that the scientific community would like to see.
But today tests using clouds in snowy mountains are providing
further evidence that cloud seeding works.
In a 2017, study in Idaho, radar footage captured
ice crystals forming in the same pattern the cloud-seeding airplane was flown in.
And the snowfall was then tracked on the ground.
A lot of variables change from the mountains of Idaho to the flats of Texas.
And thunderstorms are shorter, smaller, and change faster than snowstorms.
So far researchers have seen few downsides.
Most studies like this one conducted in Wyoming in 2014 have found negligible environmental impact.
And the cost of flying up a pilot with flares
is relatively low especially compared to the value of water.
In West Texas, the program is funded by local
water districts and costs just a few cents an acre.
But even if this technology works it only works when there's already rain in the forecast.
If we were able to create a cloud out of nowhere there would be no drought.
So this is definitely rain enhancement.
Gene's farm is right outside the cloud seeding program's target area but he wants in.
Can you prove that it helps or it doesn't? I don't know but it's better than nothing.
You can't just sit on your hands.
To make more rain, you know, cloud seeding is really the only thing out there.
I brought some of those ideas back here to our coffee shop talking with the guys,
some of the older farmers and there's some negativity there.
But definitely, i think we need to revisit that and
it may be time to have the cloud seeding man come and give us a program out here on the flats.
Opposition to cloud seeding isn't new.
In New Mexico, for instance,
some locals have expressed concerns over environmental safety and funding.
But farmers in the area would have to wait for the next rainy season to start seeing results.
During the wet years, it is very important for us,
and it's easy to get relaxed during wet years, but it's very important for us to stay
on our game and be aggressive during those wet seasons because that's when we bank our water.
So we get extra recharge into our aquifers or we get runoff in the lakes rivers and reservoirs.
Around the world, droughts are on the rise the U.N. predicts three-quarters
of the world's population may be impacted by a drought by 2050.
In places like China, Europe, Australia, India, where droughts are already worsening
cloud seeding programs are in full swing.
As cloud seeding gains traction we'll learn more about what it can and can't do for us.
But as I leave the sweltering heat of Texas
I can't help but think that to really lessen the damage caused
by droughts we need climate change mitigation.
That means reducing emissions to control the temperature to protect our water cycle as a whole.