Wintertime Orographic Cloud Seeding—A Review

This paper reviews research conducted over the last six decades to understand and quantify the efficacy of wintertime orographic cloud seeding to increase winter snowpack and water supplies within a mountain basin. The fundamental hypothesis underlying cloud seeding as a method to enhance precipitat...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of applied meteorology and climatology 2019-10, Vol.58 (10), p.2117-2140
Main Authors: Rauber, Robert M., Geerts, Bart, Xue, Lulin, French, Jeffrey, Friedrich, Katja, Rasmussen, Roy M., Tessendorf, Sarah A., Blestrud, Derek R., Kunkel, Melvin L., Parkinson, Shaun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aircraft
Census of Population
Cloud seeding
Cloud systems
Clouds
Computation
Gravitational waves
Hypotheses
Ice particles
Instrumentation
Mathematical models
Mountains
Precipitation
Snow
Snowpack
Supercooled water
Supplies
Water shortages
Water supply
Winter
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper reviews research conducted over the last six decades to understand and quantify the efficacy of wintertime orographic cloud seeding to increase winter snowpack and water supplies within a mountain basin. The fundamental hypothesis underlying cloud seeding as a method to enhance precipitation from wintertime orographic cloud systems is that a cloud’s natural precipitation efficiency can be enhanced by converting supercooled water to ice upstream and over a mountain range in such a manner that newly created ice particles can grow and fall to the ground as additional snow on a specified target area. The review summarizes the results of physical, statistical, and modeling studies aimed at evaluating this underlying hypothesis, with a focus on results from more recent experiments that take advantage of modern instrumentation and advanced computation capabilities. Recent advances in assessment and operations are also reviewed, and recommendations for future experiments, based on the successes and failures of experiments of the past, are given.
ISSN:1558-8424
1558-8432
DOI:10.1175/JAMC-D-18-0341.1