Likely a silly question, but: why don’t we use cloud seeding to fight forest fires?
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At first I thought “oh, I guess silver iodide is probably a pretty bad pollutant” but it doesn’t seem to be? Maybe the more important problem is that it appears not to work very reliably.
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
I asked myself this a couple of years ago and found articles like this. “So the problem with the clouds is they have drops in them that have no chance to reach the ground” denver.cbslocal.com/2012/06/26/clo
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That is a marvellous observation.
Hoping to find the answer in this thread.
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I asked myself this a couple of years ago and found articles like this. “So the problem with the clouds is they have drops in them that have no chance to reach the ground”
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It has worked before a few times, but my understanding is that you need pretty specific types of clouds already in the sky to seed into precipitous clouds, which aren’t there in dry years where fires are bad
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One of the most interesting "unconventional" firefighting proposals I've seen uses air force technologies. Haven't heard about any progress on it in the last couple years though.
warontherocks.com/2018/08/shocki
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Screw that. I worked as a firefighter for 6 summers & we got retardant accidentally dropped on us WAY too often for me to ever trust aircraft with dropping actual bombs next to us.
It's already dangerous enough without throwing live munitions into the mix.
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