Local water agencies weigh in on federal cloud seeding bill

Solvang is planning to send a letter to the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee opposing U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Georgia) bill that aims to ban cloud seeding. 

On Aug. 11, the Solvang City Council unanimously approved the move as part of its consent agenda. City Manager Randy Murphy told the Sun that he believed Greene’s efforts to regulate weather modification techniques was a “knee-jerk reaction to the flooding that happened in Texas over the Fourth of July holiday. There’s not any proof that that event was caused by cloud seeding.” 

In July, flooding devastated the Texas Hill Country, killing at least 135 people. In the aftermath, online theories circulating about the causes included one calling it a manmade disaster caused by cloud seeding that happened in another part of Texas a few days prior. Experts and public officials pushed back on the conspiracy theory, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who said during a July 7 press conference that there was “zero evidence of anything related to weather modification.”  

“The issue that happened in Texas is certainly tragic, but there’s no correlation … between the cloud seeding that may have occurred there in advance of the storm,” Murphy said. “A lot of times, people are quick without doing all the research to identify a reason for something that has no logical explanation.” 

Solvang is one of several water agencies in Santa Barbara County that rely on the county’s cloud-seeding program as a way to enhance its water supply. Cloud seeding has been going on in California for decades, Murphy said, and Greene’s bill (the Clear Skies Act) could potentially impact the county’s ability to continue its program into the future. 

The county injects silver iodide into storm clouds via ground-based sites and aircraft, basically enabling the cloud to drop more of the moisture it already contains in the form of rain. According to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, a thunderstorm that may produce 1 inch of rain could produce 1.05 to 1.15 inches of rain if properly seeded.

“It causes the rain to happen, and obviously that rainwater goes into the reservoir, you know, Cachuma Lake, and percolates into the groundwater,” Murphy said. “It’s a resource that we have to help perpetuate, improve, our water inventory.” 

The item was put on the Solvang City Council agenda in response to a letter from Matthew Scrudato, the Santa Barbara County Water Agency’s senior hydrologist, asking its partner agencies to contact congressional representatives and Energy and Commerce Committee members about opposing the bill.

“The legislation is based on misinformation and flawed reasoning,” Scrudato said in the letter. “It is especially troubling that representatives from states with abundant rainfall—states that do not depend on precipitation enhancement—are attempting to restrict critical water management tools used by more arid regions, such as Santa Barbara County.” 

Scrudato told the Sun that the county Water Agency already sent a letter to the committee, and that Twitchell Management Authority and the Santa Maria Valley Water Conservation District have said they were also interested in sending a letter in opposition to the bill.

Santa Barbara County has one of the longest running cloud seeding programs in the nation, he said. Cloud seeding was discovered in the 1940s, the city of Santa Barbara started seeding the Santa Ynez watershed in the ’50s, and the county’s had a consistent program since 1981. 

He said the industry—he is part of the North American Weather Modification Council—is very transparent. All the information is out there for people to see for themselves: the operating procedures, the number of operations, and the results of those operations are readily available to the public. 

“Cloud seeding, you need a storm to cloud seed. The storm has to already be there, and cloud seeding just kind of enhances the precipitation,” he said. “Out of an incredibly dry drought year, the one good storm that meets all the criteria comes in. The winds have to be perfect, the temperature has to be perfect, the super cool water has to be available.”

Santa Barbara County uses it to try to increase the rain that flows into its reservoir system, mostly in South County, but also into Twitchell outside of Santa Maria. Scrudato added that a recently completely county study found that the “there is significant benefit from the program.” 

This article appears in Aug 14-24, 2025.