Coaxing Mother Nature

Every gallon of water that flows out of the eastern Sierra Nevada each spring and summer is like money in the bank for the City of Los Angeles, or a sure-thing daily double at the race track. The Department of Water and Power collects the water and sells it to residents and businesses. And while the water runs downhill more than 200 miles from the Owens Valley it generates electric power, which the city also sells.

But in a dry year the city must buy supplies at a cost of $200 or more for an acre-foot, which is roughly the amount used by a family in a year. Thus it is not unreasonable for the city to gamble $50,000 over the next four months on a program to increase the Sierra snowpack, particularly in view of the late start that winter is getting this year.

Skeptics still are convinced that weather modification is pure hokum or witchcraft. When cloud-seeding in the Los Angeles area coincided with a killer storm some years back, County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn condemned the use of “these voodoo machines” and said that government should stop fooling with Mother Nature.

Some Earth scientists scoff at the claims of weather modifiers that injection of silver iodide particles into a potential storm cloud can increase the likely precipitation by 10% to 15%. Still, the results of long-term cloud-seeding experiments indicate that the process works.

If the Department of Water and Power program can increase the Sierra snowpack by just 5%, the city might save more than $5 million in water purchases alone. Of course, if this turns out to be another bountiful moisture year after all--still a possibility--any extra runoff would be wasted, because the city does not have the reservoir storage capacity to save it all. In that case the city can call the $50,000 an investment in eastern Sierra good will, since ski-resort operators like the plan and will take all the snow they can get.