Augustus Doricko

80% of precipitation-ish that occurs on the planet happens because you have water and clouds, and then you have natural dust, or you have bacteria that gets kicked up from the soil, all natural stuff that the water freezes onto, turns into big heavy snowflakes, and then falls, either stays as snow or melts into rain, right?

Rainmaker and cloud seeding mimics this natural process where you have water in the clouds, but the droplets aren't big enough and heavy enough to naturally precipitate.

If you put material in the cloud that has a crystal structure similar to ice, then the water will freeze onto it, grow into those big snowflakes and fall.

That's sort of like the high level, but the system that Rainmaker uses has a few other important components.

So first of all, you have to be able to detect whether a cloud has enough liquid, because if the cloud is mostly ice, then you can't freeze much more.

But we use radar to measure how much liquid is in the cloud.

The way that we do that is,

one wave of the radar moves vertically, and then the other is oriented horizontally.

So you get the amount of the beam that is reflected in both directions.

And so if you have about an equal amount of the horizontal and vertical beam reflected, then you have a spherical target.

So it's probably a water drop.

If you get more of one versus the other,

then it's probably more oblong and like a snowflake or like an ice crystal.

So we can use the radar to measure where the liquid water is in the cloud.

If we find that, then we'll launch our drones up into it.

The drones that we've built are the only ones in NATO that are under 55 pounds that can survive in severe icing conditions.

This is really cold water, right?

So we have these resistors inlaid onto the vehicle that melt the ice off as it creeps onto the drone.

So you find the water with the radar.

You fly your drone up into these conditions, hope that it survives.