Original subtitles

There are currently forty-two cloud seeding projects across the American West, like this one in Utah where they take planes like this with flares attached. They fly right into the storm

and send microscopic particles into the cloud. Particles that act like magnets for water droplets, bonding together until they are heavy enough to fall to the ground as rain or snow.

At the University of Colorado, researchers are working on artificial intelligence to deploy cloud seeding drones. And it's not just cloud seeding from the sky. There are hundreds of those things. That shack you see in the foreground is a ground-based cloud seeder.

The little flame coming out is sending tiny silver iodide particles up into the sky. When a storm comes through, they go up to two thousand feet above our head, into the storm, up those mountains, and make more snow than it naturally would.

While cloud seeding has been helping get every last drop out of some of the driest years on record, this past winter, Mother Nature came through. The Southern Rockies, which feed the Colorado River,

got more than four times their average snow. But experts say it's still not enough. As much as cloud seeding is a boost or a help, it's not a solution. The main solution is.. Conservation.

Cloud seeding is most successful in wet years, so this was a huge winter for them. They actually stopped early because Mother Nature was giving up so much. Now, studies have shown that the environmental impacts from the silver iodide on the current scale, there are no impacts

to snow or rain also downstream, so it doesn't impact, you know, the other weather. They do anticipate at least two hundred more ground cloud seeders in the future, and the federal government has committed two point six million dollars to seeding. Back to you, Gio and Eva.