Economic Effects and Public Concerns from Cloud Seeding, with Jonathan Jennings

Notable Quotes

• Cloud seeding can be used to manage local water resources: “In Utah’s case, 95 percent of our water resources in the state are generated from the snowpack. So, any increase in the snowpack can have a major impact on its water supply over the years, especially with the challenges in place here in the state of Utah, where we have to make sure we’re providing enough water for our water users, but we also have enough left over to try to bring the Great Salt Lake back to a healthy level.” (10:35)
• Cloud seeding increases precipitation but is not a quick fix for increasing water supply: “Cloud seeding for precipitation enhancement should be looked at as a long-term water resource–management tool. Cloud-seeding operations cannot and will not fill a lake or reservoir overnight, but long-term projects can help replenish aquifers over time, increase agricultural production, and increase water supply for these reservoirs over a combination of years.” (12:45)
• Public concerns about weather modification deserve transparency and dialogue: “The public has a lot of information at their hands, whether it’s through smartphones or by using artificial intelligence. They’re going to find out one way or another. Let’s be sure that we’re properly doing [cloud seeding and other weather modification] and properly informing the public of what’s happening, what the advantages of it are, what the disadvantages might be, and then go from there.” (23:47)

Top of the Stack

• Economic Impacts of Cloud Seeding on Agricultural Crops in North Dakota by Dean Bangsund and Nancy Hodur
• “A Benefit-Cost Analysis of Texas Weather Modification Activities Resulting in an Additional One Inch of Rainfall Across a Region” by Jason L. Johnson
• Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River by Patrick Dearen

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist with Utah's Division of Water Resources and the president of the Weather Modification Association. I must admit, I did not know until just a few weeks ago that weather modification—cloud seeding—was a thing that happened in the United States. But it turns out we've been doing weather modification in the United States since the 1940s. In several regions of the country, specialized equipment sprays material into clouds to increase precipitation and reduce hail with the goal of increasing water supplies and boosting agricultural productivity.

Jonathan is an expert on this topic, and today I'll ask him about the history of these efforts, how effective they are, what some of the unintended consequences might be, and why the technologies are controversial. Stay with us.

All right. Jonathan Jennings, from the Utah Division of Water Resources, welcome to Resources Radio.

Jonathan Jennings: Thank you for having me, Daniel. I'm glad to be here.

Daniel Raimi: We're thrilled to have you. I'm really excited about this conversation, partly because it's something that I know virtually nothing about, so I get to learn about a whole new thing today, and I think our audience might, as well. I imagine that when you were growing up, you didn't dream of working on weather modification, if you even knew what it was. So, I'm curious, how did you end up working on such a really interesting and specialized topic like this?

Jonathan Jennings: It all goes back to where I grew up, in Western Pennsylvania, which was the location of the only F5 tornado, which is the strongest on the Fujita scale, to impact the state. While I was learning about this event over the years, I became fascinated by the weather and knew from a very young age I always wanted to be a meteorologist. But once I got to college, I started to realize that my calling was going to be a bit different than most.

I knew I didn't want to be a shift worker for the federal government. I also knew I didn't want to sit in a room and forecast for eight hours a day for a private company. Instead, I wanted to find a way to help people. So, when I first learned about cloud seeding from a classmate who had graduated a few years before me, I was intrigued. Admittedly, I wasn't too sure if cloud seeding even worked.

But after arriving in Texas back in 2011, which was the driest and hottest year ever in Texas, I crossed a completely dry Pedernales River, which feeds Austin's Lake Travis. I knew at this point something had to be done about the water situation in Texas. Over the years, as an operator, I saw firsthand the impact cloud seeding has. And, as some of the old timers would say in the industry, once you get that silver iodide in your blood, you become a lifer. That has certainly been the case.

Daniel Raimi: That is really interesting. Well, that leads right into my first question, which is asking about the old timers. It really surprised me to learn that we've been doing weather modification and cloud seeding in the United States for decades and decades. Can you give us a thumbnail sketch about where this activity began in the United States and what the original motivation for it was?

Jonathan Jennings: Yes. Cloud seeding, or weather modification, could date back as early as the late 1890s into the 1900s. That’s when C. W. Post, the cereal tycoon, was doing the first experiments in Texas, where he was exploding dynamite on kites. He was hoping that the percussion would agitate the supercooled liquid water in the cloud enough to force freezing to occur. So, you could go all the way back into the early 1900s and read those stories from C. W. Post and others.

The modern day programs were built on the 1946 discovery by General Electric's Bernard Vonnegut of silver iodide acting as an ice-nucleating agent. Once this was discovered, programs started to pop up all over the Mountain West and Midwestern states and down into Texas as a response to the 1950s Dust Bowl. So, projects in Texas, Idaho, and Utah, among others, started to get going.

In fact, in 1950, President Harry S. Truman's Water Resources Policy Commission generated a report called A Water Policy for the American People. In that report, it was stated that the attempt to use science and technical skill to force water from the clouds is symbolic of the modern determination to control and use water rather than submit to it. These early initiatives led to states like Texas and Utah creating laws to license, permit, and oversee these activities.

From here, the Bureau of Reclamation formed the Division of Atmospheric Water Resource Management, and the federal government, from this point on, started to conduct several research studies and operational programs that continued into the 1980s and 1990s. The primary project that gets a lot of publicity is Project Skywater, which aimed to study cloud seeding as a tool for precipitation enhancement, but also provided a better understanding of cloud microphysics. Unrelated to cloud seeding, we were learning a lot about cloud microphysics.

Since the early 2000s, federal funding toward cloud seeding has been exclusively limited to only the 2017 Idaho study, Seeded and Natural Orographic Wintertime Clouds: The Idaho Experiment, or the SNOWIE study, and more recently, the Southern Nevada Water Authority's grant, which is being provided to upper Colorado River Basin states for instrumentation like radiometers, which measure a cloud's liquid water.

Daniel Raimi: That is all so interesting. You mentioned a couple of pieces of technology and instrumentation. You mentioned silver iodide a couple of times. Can you give us a sense of what the mechanics are for doing weather modification? I imagine there's an airplane involved—or is it kites? Balloons? What are the physical processes that we actually do to intervene up there in the clouds?

Jonathan Jennings: We have to look at it in two different ways. We have winter snowpack augmentation and then we have summer convective precipitation enhancement. Both of these types of cloud seeding are built on the same physics, but operationally are conducted a bit differently. First and foremost, clouds that are nearing precipitation or that are already precipitating must be present and must include supercooled liquid water. When this is determined, winter projects—so, for snowpack augmentation—typically use ground-based generators that rely on the orographic lift to transport the material to areas where supercooled liquid water exists.

The goal here is to enhance the snowpack on the mountain areas of the Mountain West. The material that we use, called silver iodide, acts as an ice-nucleating agent thanks to its crystalline structure. Once it's in contact with supercooled liquid water, it tricks that supercooled water into thinking it's ice, and then you allow for more efficient droplet growth through the ice-nucleating process, and the snowflakes grow to become heavy enough and fall as additional precipitation.

Some programs will use aircrafts to fly either within or just above the cloud, and then they use pyrotechnic flares to distribute the material. Most recently, we started to use drones. Actually, in these cases, we're getting drones into lower parts of the cloud where the supercooled water is present without having to deal with any icing issues in the aircraft and potentially putting a pilot into any type of danger.

Meanwhile, for convective programs, we have to have storms that are present along with inflow along the leading edge. Without inflow, we can't get the material into the cloud, so the aircraft will fly in what we call “visual flight rules,” or VFR. This allows the pilot to fly wherever he needs to. There's the meteorologist on the ground showing the pilot exactly where to go and how much of the flares to use. But that pilot, when he gets into the portion of the cloud that has inflow, is able to look at the vertical speed indicator of the airplane and really feel the inflow.

From there, we're burning what's called “burn-in-place” pyrotechnic flares. The inflow transports the material to just above the freezing level, where that supercooled water exists, and once again acts as an ice-nucleating agent. And this method is done both for rain enhancement [and snowpack augmentation]. So, we're trying to increase the precipitation but also do hail suppression, because what we're trying to do is spread more ice nuclei across the cloud. That limits the ability for some of the particles to become larger and grow as larger hail embryos. The program in North Dakota is specifically doing hail suppression.

Daniel Raimi: Great. The motivation there, I imagine, is to suppress hail because it’s damaging to crops, right?

Jonathan Jennings: In North Dakota, it's because of crops. In Alberta, Canada, insurance companies are funding hail-suppression projects because of property damage.

Daniel Raimi: Interesting.

How widespread are these types of activities? You've mentioned a couple of geographies already, but where is this happening today in the United States, and why is it happening in those particular places?

Jonathan Jennings: Convective programs—these are the programs that operate during the summertime—are limited to just a few states. We just talked about North Dakota and their hail-suppression efforts, but in Texas and New Mexico they're doing cloud seeding in the summer to focus on precipitation enhancement, mainly for agricultural purposes or for aquifer recharge and water supply. We do have a new program that could be coming online this year in Arizona. As far as winter projects go, the focus is on the Mountain West states of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, and California.

We do have a new program developed this past winter in Oregon, and then we have possible programs in the near future in Montana and Washington. All of these have a focus on precipitation enhancement, although there is one company in Idaho that does cloud seeding for the purpose of increasing hydroelectric power via increased streamflow. In Utah’s case, 95 percent of our water resources in the state are generated from the snowpack. So, any increase in the snowpack can have a major impact on its water supply over the years, especially with the challenges in place here in the state of Utah, where we have to make sure we're providing enough water for our water users, but we also have enough left over to try to bring the Great Salt Lake back to a healthy level.

Daniel Raimi: That's a whole other conversation that I'd love to have someday, about the Great Salt Lake and what's happening there, because that's another fascinating story. But let's stick with cloud seeding for now. There's a pretty substantial body of research that, again, I didn't even know existed until a couple of weeks ago that's tried to examine the effectiveness of weather modification, both in terms of its ability to achieve the outcomes that it desires to do, like increasing rainfall or increasing snowpack, but also its desired economic outcomes that are measured in crop productivity, sales, and things like that. Can you tell us some of the key lessons from that body of research that's been evolving over the decades?

Jonathan Jennings: Sure. There's three big takeaways when I think about at least the modern-day research that has been ongoing. The 2017 Idaho SNOWIE study, which was conducted by a team from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, proved that, yes, cloud seeding does indeed work. What we still don't know is how well it works and in what kinds of situations it works really well in, as opposed to others. The physics are there, and the physics have yet to fail us. So, we need to just continue to look at what SNOWIE did and expand upon that. Here in Utah, we're going to try to answer the question as to how much it works.

A second take is that a lot of these different states have conducted evaluations on their own, and they've all been applied in different ways. But they all come to the same solution: they're increasing precipitation in the 5 percent to 15 percent range. So, despite different techniques and convective seeding versus what we're seeing in the winter programs, it's been pretty consistent: increased precipitation by 5 percent to 15 percent, closer to 10 percent to 15 percent.

The third thing that I always try to focus on is that cloud seeding for precipitation enhancement should be looked at as a long-term water resource–management tool. Cloud-seeding operations cannot and will not fill a lake or reservoir overnight, but long-term projects can help replenish aquifers over time, increase agricultural production, and increase water supply for these reservoirs over a combination of years.

If you think about it, a 10 percent increase over a decade is an additional year of precipitation for these areas. In the West Texas city of San Angelo, during the drought of 2011, the director of water utilities there said, “We would've run out of water had it not been for our long-term cloud seeding program.” So, water users or water managers are starting to really look at this as a true water resource–management tool, but it has to be looked at in a long-term way.

Daniel Raimi: It sounds like, from some of the descriptions you gave earlier, that these activities are expanding across the United States. Is that fair to say?

Jonathan Jennings: It depends where you are. We're seeing some shrinkage in the target areas in the Texas area, mainly due to misinformation. But in the Mountain West states we're seeing a lot of expansion. I think part of that is because the SNOWIE project in 2017 was conducted around winter orographic seeding as opposed to summer convective seeding. So, we need to have a similar study for these summer programs to help propel them to another 15, 20 years of greatness.

Daniel Raimi: I want to come back to that topic of misinformation and public concerns over these technologies. I'm sure our listeners are thinking about them as we talk.

There’s one other piece of data that I wanted to point to. There’s an interesting study that I came across from North Dakota. A couple of researchers, Dean Bangsund and Nancy Hodur, evaluated North Dakota's cloud-seeding program. They found that the program cost about $1 million per year, but it produced direct benefits on the order of $20 million–$40 million a year, in terms of reduced hail damage, increased crop yields, and things like that. Is that consistent with studies that you've seen from other parts of the country?

Jonathan Jennings: Yeah, very much so. There was a great study done in Texas back in 2014 by Dr. Jason Johnson of Texas A&M at Stephenville. He looked at what one inch of additional precipitation does during the convective season and found that for every dollar that these programs are putting into the project, they're seeing a return of $34. For the West Texas target area near San Angelo, they're running a budget of about $350,000 a year, but they're seeing economic returns exceeding $6 million a year.

Here in Utah, we look at the cost per acre foot. In the 2018 study that we had conducted looking at streamflow measurements, we were showing that we were producing an acre-foot of water for roughly $2. When you compare that to desalination or water reuse, the cost of those could exceed over $1,000 per acre-foot. So, this is some of the cheapest water you're going to find.

Daniel Raimi: That makes me wonder about the next thing I wanted to ask you, which is about the connectivity of the weather systems that cloud seeding is intervening in. People have heard the adage about a butterfly flapping its wings and how that affects the weather on the other side of the world. How much do we know about the knock-on effects of weather modifications? So, not just the direct effects of increasing water in one place that you're trying to accomplish? What about things that might happen that are unintended consequences of the programs?

Jonathan Jennings: People like me, who are just now in the industry for the last decade, are standing on the shoulders of many giants that came before us. So, we are very fortunate to already have the test of time being done for us. Cloud seeding, we need to remember, is done in a very localized manner. The goal is to produce just a bit more precipitation than what would've otherwise been generated. So, some ideas surrounding the theory of robbing Peter to pay Paul are inaccurate. But why is that?

First, winter orographic clouds only precipitate about 1 percent of the moisture available. Therefore, if we're increasing precipitation by 10 percent, we're only decreasing the moisture content of that cloud by about 0.1 percent.

In convective clouds, studies have shown that these systems are roughly 19 percent efficient. So again, we're only taking about 2 percent of the moisture out of those clouds that would've otherwise happened.

But also, we need to remember that these clouds are not closed systems. Inflows of moisture are ongoing, replenishing what is being precipitated. Furthermore, when you take supercooled liquid water, and you change the phase from liquid to an ice crystal, you're releasing latent heat. When that latent heat is released in the cloud, it allows the cloud to grow and expand, allowing it to last longer and tap into additional moisture in the environment than what would've otherwise happened. So, robbing Peter to pay Paul is more like paying Peter, paying Paul, paying everybody. Because it's happening in a localized manner, we're not having large-scale impacts. If you look at precipitation maps, you're not seeing much of a difference in terms of overall state-wide or region-wide types of changes. This is just very localized, tapping into that supercooled water that otherwise would still just be airborne.

Daniel Raimi: That's interesting. It sounds like in response to the idea of robbing Peter to pay Paul, as you say, you would argue that those knock-on, second-order effects are pretty minimal, or maybe even net positive when you take into account these heat effects.

Jonathan Jennings: All the research that we've seen, whether it was statistical evaluations or modeling efforts, show that it's a net positive in terms of precipitation. Those of us here in Utah would be hearing it from our colleagues over in Colorado if there was an impact. But instead, Colorado very greatly supports the Utah project, just like we support the Colorado project. There's really no negative effects in terms of large-scale changes to the weather.

Daniel Raimi: That’s really interesting.

I'm curious if you can say a little bit more about the concerns that some people have over the deployment of these technologies. It's related to, I think, public misunderstandings of solar radiation management and geoengineering and concerns about what's happening with contrails and airplanes. Some conspiracy theories are certainly out there. Can you talk about what some of the concerns that you've heard on the ground are, and what you think they're grounded in?

Jonathan Jennings: I think the biggest concern that we often get is easily and quickly taken care of by just having a simple conversation. Cloud seeding often gets lumped into the idea of geoengineering or the idea of chemtrails. Those are typically taking place, or are at least theorized to be taking place, in clear skies, usually at very high altitudes, with aircrafts. Here in Utah, we have one airplane, and that airplane is only used when we have winter inversion days. That means our ground-based generators don't have any dispersing going on, because the air is so stagnant.

We send the airplane to get above that inversion and seed from there. We don't have that kind of fleet. So, we often get lumped in with the idea of chemtrails, but that is most certainly not us. We don't have the budget for that. We don't have the manpower for it, and we wouldn't be able to get away with that. In fact, I would oppose any type of geoengineering or chemtrail activity in the state of Utah. So, that's one area of the misconception.

The other is the robbing of Peter to pay Paul, which we just covered. The third is the idea of silver iodide. Silver iodide can be scary to people because of the term silver. Silver itself is indeed toxic, and the silver ion does have major implications when it comes to environmental impact or health. But when it's attached to the iodide molecule, it has a very strong covalent bond, and this allows it to stay insoluble in water. That makes it great as both a seeding agent, because we are dispersing this material into supersaturated environments, but it also makes us safe on the ground.

When it gets on the ground, it's not bioavailable, because it's in the solid form. But also, when it gets in the water, studies done by Cardno ENTRIX back in 2011 showed that the maximum concentration of silver when in water coming off of the silver iodide molecule is about 0.984 micrograms per liter. For reference, to have any impact on aquatic life, there needs to be four to seven micrograms per liter. And to have any negative effect on drinking water, it needs to be 100 micrograms per liter. So, we are not only well below those thresholds, but we're also below the threshold of natural background levels of silver in our environment. In southern Utah, natural silver is about six micrograms per liter. In order to look at all this, we have to measure in the parts per trillion, and there's only a few labs in the United States that are capable of measuring the parts per trillion.

So, it's the safety of the molecule, but it's also the amount that we use. For a general cloud-seeding mission using an aircraft, we're firing anywhere from 10 to 15 glaciogenic flares. Those are flares that have silver iodide in them. You're looking at 50 grams of silver iodide across areas that can cover multiple counties in west Texas, which are very large counties.

By the time it's coming out of the rain, there's no better filter than a cloud, and you can't trace it. You just cannot trace the levels of silver iodide that we are using.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. Thank you for outlining all of those.

Going back to the solar geoengineering idea, I understand that you would be concerned about doing something like that at large scale in Utah or perhaps elsewhere. But there are folks in the research community who are looking into solar geoengineering and trying to think about whether we should be deploying it, how we should do it if we're deploying it, and how it should be governed. I'm curious if, from the experience of working on cloud seeding for a long time, there are any lessons that come out of your experience or the field's experience that are applicable to people who are starting to look into solar geoengineering?

Jonathan Jennings: Yes, of course. I think, first and foremost, it takes time. When it comes to modifying the atmosphere, we need to also learn lessons from modifying the land. At a local level, plowing a field or building a reservoir may not have large-scale impacts. But when you go to plowing hundreds of fields or starting to divert water, then you can start to have very large implications. So, I like to think of cloud seeding more as the former, where geoengineering is something that needs to be more closely monitored in research.

It took 70 years for cloud seeding to get where it is today, and it took a lot of work meeting with water users, water managers, and other stakeholders to make sure that it's done correctly. It's been deemed safe and, overall, has a good return on investment. Geoengineering, to my knowledge, isn't happening at this large scale operationally, but if it is, and it's being done without public input, I think that will create distrust for years, if not decades, with the public.

The public has a lot of information at their hands, whether it's the smartphones or using artificial intelligence. They're going to find out one way or another. Let's be sure that we're properly doing this and properly informing the public of what's happening, what the advantages of it are, what the disadvantages might be, and then go from there.

Personally, I would oppose any type of high atmospheric aerosol spraying. The lack of understanding of its long-term effects, I think, is a question that needs to be answered. But I will admit that I have some ignorance here, as I haven’t really looked into geoengineering science or theory as much, so I could certainly be convinced. But right now, I think we need to just do a lot more work and maybe stay in the lab instead of going outdoors and doing this in real time.

Daniel Raimi: Right. I think that's pretty consistent with how most of the research community is approaching this. I think there are a couple of exceptions, maybe. But my understanding is that we are very much in the research and pilot stage, rather than anything more widespread.

We've done several episodes on solar geoengineering on this show, and mostly what we've talked about is the governance of solar geoengineering. If you were going to deploy it, then how do you govern that deployment system? I'm curious about how cloud seeding is governed. You've mentioned that there is some federal and state involvement. I wonder if there's local involvement. What are the governance structures, and how much do they vary across state lines?

Jonathan Jennings: Right now, cloud seeding typically is governed by the individual states. You have states like Texas and Utah that have a licensing and permit process and regulations like suspension criteria in place, so we're not causing any hazardous weather. That also requires a public notice of attention, which is very important. But also we vet the staff, making sure that the staff of these contractors are qualified to take on the operations. We also make sure that reporting is provided in a timely manner.

The federal government does require reporting to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration annually, but these reports are not greatly detailed and certainly need to be improved. Those of us in the cloud-seeding industry appreciate the regulation, as it provides a more transparent process and a layer of credibility to our work. But we have been, as an industry, working closely with the Government Accountability Office, trying to determine ways to have better reporting practices, both at the state and federal level.

We do also have local sponsors in some of these states, and they contract with a contractor. In Utah, we provide a 50-50 cost share to these folks, but it's up to the contractor to do the license and permit applications through the state governments.

Daniel Raimi: Got it. That’s really interesting.

So Jonathan, my last question before we go to Top of the Stack is about public knowledge. We've already talked about public fears about deploying these technologies. But I'm curious, how much do people know about the existence of these programs? If I met a random farmer from somewhere near San Angelo, Texas, or western North Dakota, and I asked them, "What do you think about the cloud-seeding program?" Do you think they would know what I was talking about?

Jonathan Jennings: I think, in most cases where the cloud seeding is occurring, yes. You would run into several people that not only know about the program, but strongly support the programs. But as we try to be more transparent with our work, especially when it comes to posting things on social media, it could get pretty ugly. I've had several cases where people called in with questions about cloud seeding, and all it takes is a very nice conversation for them to understand that our projects have no nefarious purposes, that we're truly trying to solve a problem.

Once you're able to get them disconnected from the idea of chemtrails, they become much more open and appreciative of the work we're doing because they understand that water resources are very important in some of these states. We always cover the idea of silver being toxic, so that helps a lot. But right now we're dealing with 31 different states that are trying to ban geoengineering, and cloud seeding has been wrapped into these bills.

We've been having to lobby on behalf of the industry to say, "That's not what we're doing. We're different from that." And in most cases, the legislators are actually pretty embarrassed. They say, "We didn't realize these were different. We didn't realize the importance of cloud seeding." They've been able to exclude cloud seeding from some of these bills. But it's certainly interesting to see how much stuff is being pushed in the political world based on some conspiracy theories around chemtrails.

For the most part, it's widely accepted, but it's always the 1 percent that are the loudest on the social media pages, and they're always asking why we're not being transparent. It's because when we are, we're getting threats. We've had lines crossed many times in the recent months, so a lot of cloud-seeding industry partners are just staying quiet now in fear of any type of retaliation from the public.

Daniel Raimi: Wow, that's so interesting and troubling. I'm sorry that you and your colleagues are having to deal with that. It sounds really stressful. We're certainly at a time of rife misinformation and distrust, and it sounds like this is another area where that's percolating up to the public.

Well, Jonathan, I'm sorry we ended on that downer of a note, but this has been a fascinating conversation. I've learned a ton, and I'm sure our audience has, too. Now, I'd love to ask you the same question that we ask all of our guests at the end of each episode, which is to recommend something that you think is really great that's maybe related to the environment or not. We're not very picky. So, Jonathan, what's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Jonathan Jennings: I've only been in Utah for a little over a year, so I was hoping to find a little bit more about the dust impacts that we're feeling from the Great Salt Lake due to it being at a low elevation. Dust is a major issue. But I'm going to go back to my time in Texas, where I was for 13 years. I just learned how rivers became a way of life to people in Texas. One river in particular became a favorite of mine, primarily due to the proximity it had to where I worked, but also the challenges that I watched people face all the time.

The Pecos River is headwatered in north central New Mexico and is one of the rivers that flows into the Rio Grande. The book by Patrick Dearen called Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River covers a lot of the challenges from massive irrigation projects, invasive species, fire, floods, usage conflicts, and water-quality issues that the Pecos River has. The Pecos River and the Rio Grande, in my mind, need a lot more attention moving forward, just like we're doing with the Colorado River. I feel that these two rivers are ignored, and I think it's even more complex than the Colorado River, considering that you have international water rights that need to be considered there. It's sad to see that those rivers often go dry in the middle to late summers. In fact, the Pecos River is scheduled to go dry this year in mid-June, which is just so unfortunate. So, I would recommend Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River by Patrick Dearen.

Daniel Raimi: Fascinating. That makes me think of the song and the story of Pecos Bill. If people don't know about the song or the movies that have been made about Pecos Bill, they should definitely check it out.

Well, Jonathan Jennings from the Utah Division of Water Resources and the Weather Modification Association, once again, thank you so much for coming onto the show and helping us learn about these really fascinating issues. We really appreciate it.

Jonathan Jennings: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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