Augustus Doricko

pretty tough for having stuck out that period.

It's sort of like all startups think about how Elon blew up three rockets before he actually launched one into space.

We had a lot of drones crash before we actually were able to make it precipitate.

And so we were up in northeastern Oregon in a town called Pendleton.

It's where Pendleton Wool is from, if you know it.

It's a town of 16,000 people, 2,000 of which are in a prison.

Most of the rest are farmers.

So super, super small spot.

We have a team of forecasters that saw that there was an atmospheric river coming in.

The clouds were about two kilometers thick, almost all liquid.

We were able to, one, finally get the radar system functional enough to measure that water and then launch weather balloons to take in-cloud measurements of the water there.

And then we were just flying drones for hours and hours.

And we didn't have the...

processing capability live yet to take live measurements.

So we're just out there operating flying drones for a few hours.

And then we pack up, go back to the warehouse that we were all living out of, look at the radar data, and then saw from the time that we started operating, about 15 minutes afterwards, this

plume on the radar exclusively downwind.

So this whole big cloud system wasn't precipitating, and only on the radar do you see downwind where our particle plume was, an increase in precipitation.

And another thing that I guess this is an opportune time to share is there was a snow day at the local school district, 15 miles north of where we were where the wind was going.

So that was a pretty cool thing to have done for the kids there locally.