Estimating the Fraction of Winter Orographic Precipitation Produced under Conditions Meeting the Seeding Criteria for the Wyoming Weather Modification Pilot Project

Abstract

AbstractAnnual precipitation increases of 10% or more are often quoted for the impact of winter orographic cloud seeding; however, establishing the basis for such values is problematic for two reasons. First, the impact of glaciogenic seeding of candidate orographic storms has not been firmly established. Second, not all winter precipitation is produced by candidate “seedable” storms. Addressing the first question motivated the Wyoming state legislature to fund a multiyear, crossover, randomized cloud-seeding experiment in southeastern Wyoming to quantify the impact of glaciogenic seeding of wintertime orographic clouds. The crossover design requires two barriers, one randomly selected for seeding, for comparisons of seeded and nonseeded precipitation under relatively homogeneous atmospheric conditions. Addressing the second question motivated the work here. The seeding criteria—700-hPa temperatures ≤−8°C, 700-hPa winds between 210° and 315°, and the presence of supercooled liquid water—were applied to eight winters to determine the percent of winter precipitation that may fall under the seeding criteria. Since no observational datasets provide precipitation and all of the atmospheric variables required for this study, a regional climate model dynamical downscaling of historical data over 8 years was used. The accuracy of the model was tested against several measurements, and the small model biases were removed. On average, ~26% of the time between 15 November and 15 April atmospheric conditions were seedable over the barriers in southeastern Wyoming. These seedable conditions were accompanied by precipitation ~12%–14% of the time, indicating that ~27%–30% of the winter precipitation resulted from seedable clouds.