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Cloud seeding can be done by ground generators or by plane.

Farmers wouldn't expect to harvest any crops without first sowing some seeds. Is the ski industry close behind when it comes to snow? In early September, the Winter Park ski area announced it's plans to collaborate with Denver Water on a could seeding project, aimed at increasing the amount of winter precipitation, aka snow, that falls from the skies. The resort will be splitting the $110,000 cost of the project with Denver Water.

Right... "Cloud seeding"? WTF?

Winter Park Resort

Cloud seeding technology: an in-exact but consciously initiated science.

Back to the farming analogy. High up in them clouds, ice nuclei are the catalysts for turning water droplets into snow particles. Cloud seeding generators send silver iodide particles into the mix, effectively acting as bonus ice nuclei crystals, giving water more chances to turn into snow. It's billed as making the clouds more "efficient" at producing snow: if you want more powder, you sow more seeds—or so the thinking goes.

It's a logic that fellow Colorado resort Vail has been engaging in for over thirty years, and by the mid- 2000's was spending nearly $60,000 a month on. The Denver Water Department, in the grips of a severe drought, pumped close to an estimated million into cloud seeding research during the same time period.

The technology, developed in the 1940s, has been used in a variety of applications, mostly for increasing precipitation, and is now being exported, with some worry, to developing countries. With the ski area cloud seeding projects reported to contain "less iodine that what is found in salt on food," the real concern for ski resorts is effectiveness.

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Firing up a ground based silver iodide generator in Central Colorado.

The silver iodide particles emitted from cloud seeding generators have to be coordinated with storm clouds, and then those storm clouds have to keep on track toward the target mountain. And while clouds can be seeded, they have yet to be controlled, and the snow that is produced is no different than the regular variety, making measurement hard to come by.

Still, Vail and neighboring Beaver Creek claim that during cloud seeding months, snowfalls were 8 to 25 percent deeper than other Colorado Ski areas. The evidence still seems to be out, but compared to the cost of snowmaking (more than 1.5 million yearly in Vail's case), seeding the clouds is a cheaper, and greener solution to increasing a resort's snowpack.

For a related report on human impact on winter weather -- this one happening inadvertently -- click here.

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