People have tried to manipulate the weather for thousands of years, whether through magic, superstition, or science. In the 1840s, one schoolteacher suggested that the United States regulate the climate by setting massive, weekly forest fires. Fifty years later, researchers were trying to “shock” rain out clouds with cannon fire, and by 1989, one engineer proposed sending a 1,200-mile-wide glass parasol into space to reflect solar radiation and cool the planet.
Although many of the wilder ideas to control nature were eventually abandoned, what’s now known as geoengineering remains a strange, somewhat ad hoc field even today. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that the federal government still does not have sufficient oversight over weather modification activities and is also “not fully meeting its responsibilities to maintain and share weather modification reports.” The two problems are connected, the report says. The lack of supervision could allow harmful, rogue geoengineering operations to proceed largely unmonitored, while the lack of transparency could fuel misinformation and public confusion about these activities.
A better database of geoengineering operations that was easier for the public to navigate could go a long way toward dispelling that misinformation and improving oversight, said Karen Howard, the GAO’s director of science and technology assessment.
“If people had a place to be referred to, where they could see, ‘Oh, this place in Idaho, they’re cloud seeding to try to increase the snow for a ski area,’ it would address what is actually occurring, and not what people imagine is occurring,” Howard said. “I think it could help with that quite a bit.”
One of the main gaps in oversight is that state agencies or companies performing weather modification often aren’t even aware that they’re required to communicate their activities to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Howard. Public outreach around geoengineering from the federal government has been patchy and insufficient, she said, and even when operators do take steps to document their efforts, the forms they’re required to fill out are confusing and outdated.
“They don’t always accommodate the newer, emerging technologies like solar geoengineering,” Howard said. “So what submissions there are have errors or missing information, and there are a lot of missing reports that we know should be in there, but aren’t.” The forms, according to the report, “have remained virtually unchanged since 1974,” despite growing interest in solar geoengineering, and NOAA officials told the GAO that they make no effort to seek out unreported weather modification experiments.
To further complicate matters, once the reports are filed, NOAA does essentially nothing with them. “They basically just throw them into the database as is,” said Howard. “They don’t check whether they’re complete, whether they’re accurate — anything along those lines.”
The riskier and more ambitious geoengineering ideas to fight climate change tend to get the most media attention. Stratospheric aerosol injection, for instance, involves spraying small particles like sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Marine cloud brightening entails shooting sea salts into low-level clouds to cool a smaller area. Others have proposed covering the Arctic in tiny glass beads to reflect sunlight and prevent glaciers from melting. Start-ups such as Make Sunsets — which sells cooling credits to customers in exchange for releasing balloons filled with sulfur dioxide — are beginning to proliferate, but overall, solar geoengineering is still happening only on a very small scale. According to the GAO report, out of 1,084 reports in NOAA’s public database as of February 2025, only four outline solar geoengineering activities.
But small-scale cloud-seeding operations — which involve injecting small particles like silver iodide into clouds to induce rain or snow — have been going on for more than 80 years now.
As drought intensifies and water demand increases across the West, states have been ramping up cloud-seeding efforts, as one way to work around the lack of water. Although cloud seeding is hardly a miracle cure, it is seen as a relatively simple way to increase rain by about 5 to 20 percent.
Conspiracy theories surrounding cloud seeding have gained a foothold in recent years, though. Most of them posit that the government is distributing harmful chemicals and trying to control the weather through chemtrails, which are nothing more than the water vapor left behind by planes that freezes in the cold air. After the deadly floods in Texas this past July, false claims that the floods were caused by a regional cloud-seeding operation days earlier spread widely, drawing the attention of politicians like then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, a Republican from Georgia, who introduced a measure in the House of Representatives that would make weather modification a felony.
Green’s bill, which was called the “Clear Skies Act,” ultimately died in committee, but as of last July, 30 states had introduced similar bills, with Tennessee, Florida, and Louisiana passing bans on the technology. Wyoming narrowly avoided such a ban in February, after state water managers explained that they were likely to face severe water restrictions as cuts to manage the Colorado River’s dwindling supply go into effect. Brad Brooks, director of Cheyenne, Wyoming’s Board of Public utilities, spoke at a panel on cloud seeding last fall after legislation to stop the technology was introduced in the Wyoming House of Representatives. According to Wyoming Public Media, he warned that the city would likely have to make due with half of its current water supply should the Colorado River cuts go into effect.
“I have 70,000 plus people that we provide water to,” Brooks said, “and I’ve got to find additional water resources to make up for that shortfall.”
Cloud seeding alone can’t fix that. Another report from the GAO last year found that the process still needs more research to determine how well it works and why. But as things stand, cloud seeding remains “a tool for helping to augment precipitation,” said Jeff French, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming. “It doesn’t come anywhere near solving the problem of water in the West, but any little bit of additional water that you can get into the system is helpful, especially in a situation where we have water that is well over-allocated above what the natural system can provide.”
According to Howard, establishing clearer guidelines and expectations for geoengineering operations could help clear up some of the confusion around this technology. The GAO recommended that NOAA establish written guidelines for reviewing reports, improve the forms given to operators, and establish a process for regularly informing state and local agencies about NOAA’s role in geoengineering oversight.
This transparency could prove critical as interest in solar engineering grows. This past July, a large-scale solar geoengineering experiment in the San Francisco Bay led by researchers from the University of Washington was shut down by Alameda city officials who complained that that no one had informed them about the experiment ahead of time.
“I think there’s understandable concern about [solar] geoengineering,” Howard said. “I’m not saying it’s hazardous. I’m saying we need research to know a) whether it’s effective, and b) whether there are unintended consequences that we might not be aware of. That research is not really occurring right now.”
