Identification

Title

Potential for ground-based glaciogenic cloud seeding over mountains in the interior Western United States and anticipated changes in a warmer climate

Abstract

Glaciogenic cloud seeding has long been practiced as a way to increase water availability in arid regions, such as the interior western United States. Many seeding programs in this region target cold-season orographic clouds with ground-based silver iodide generators. Here, the “seedability” (defined as the fraction of time that conditions are suitable for ground-based seeding) is evaluated in this region from 10 years of hourly output from a regional climate model with a horizontal resolution of 4 km. Seedability criteria are based on temperature, presence of supercooled liquid water, and Froude number, which is computed here as a continuous field relative to the local terrain. The model’s supercooled liquid water compares reasonably well to microwave radiometer observations. Seedability peaks at 20%-30% for many mountain ranges in the cold season, with the best locations just upwind of crests, over the highest terrain in Colorado and Wyoming, as well as over ranges in the northwest interior. Mountains farther south are less frequently seedable, because of warmer conditions, but when they are, cloud supercooled liquid water content tends to be relatively high. This analysis is extended into a future climate, anticipated for later this century, with a mean temperature 2.0 K warmer than the historical climate. Seedability generally will be lower in this future warmer climate, especially in the most seedable areas, but, when seedable, clouds tend to contain slightly more supercooled liquid water.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7vd730x

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-09-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact