Potential Water Augmentation from Cloud Seeding in the Colorado River Basin

Abstract

A spatially-distributed snow energy and mass balance model, updated with all available snowpack observations, is used to assess the potential for water augmentation by winter orographic cloud seeding in the Colorado River Basin. The modeling system outputs snow water equivalent (SWE) on a 1 km grid throughout the continental United States. The April 1 SWE from the last two years are horizontally integrated across existing and potential seeding target areas in the basin and multiplied by approximately 0.1 to calculate water yields from an assumed seeding-induced increase of 10 percent. Major uncertainties in this method, including snowpack ablation and target area selection, are described. Given those uncertainties, it is estimated that in an average precipitation year, about one million acre-feet of additional snowpack water could be produced by seeding. Somewhat more could be produced in a wet year and about 500,000 acre-feet in a dry year. These figures are reasonably close to those from older studies of augmentation potential in the basin.