Cloud Seeding Reduces Large Rain Events
Dr.Ruiz, the districts consultant, says that cloud seeding changes the hail inside the cloud to snow lower in the cloud to produce the same amount of rain over a larger area. He said the rain is gentler. The district is small; so, it means that some of the seeded clouds rain more outside the district and there are fewer large rains. The data supports Dr. Ruiz, proving that there are fewer high rainfall months in the district when they seed clouds.
Comparing the seeded growing season months with over 4" of rainfall in the last 12 years to the previous 12 years, we found that the number of months in the seeded years were down anywhere from 20% to 60%!
Months with over 4"
To make sure that we weren't distorting the figures with data from 2011, we took it out (we didn't take the driest of the previous years out.
For the same years, the number of months with over 4" of rain in Oklahoma City increased. PGCD quibbled about using OKC, but the data on the four district towns remained the same. PGCD's seeding cost the district rain!
The impact is tremendous. If Amarillo would have had the same number of months with over 4" during the 12 seeded years and the amount would have been the average, Amarillo would have had .95" more rain per year during the 12 seeded years. Clarendon would have had 3.3" more per year; Pampa would have had 2.64" more per year and Shamrock would have had 4.35" more per year!
PGCD does not seed when a storm is already severe. If they did, there would be even fewer big rainfall months.
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