Forty-One Cloud-Seeding Contracts. Not One Of Them Pays For Rain.

GRAND JUNCTION, Colorado — Forty-one live cloud-seeding contracts. Not one of them makes a payment conditional on precipitation.

Every payment term in the pile is denominated in something the operator controls: flight hours flown, flares expended, generator-hours run. In thirty-eight of the forty-one, the deliverable clause is some version of the same sentence — that seeding operations were conducted in accordance with the suspension criteria.

Two go further and expressly disclaim any precipitation outcome, in plain language, on page four.

Whether seeding works is not the argument on this desk. It works, a little. What nobody can do is weigh the rain that would have fallen anyway. So we stopped arguing about the physics and asked what the buyers are actually promised.

What the money buys

The contracts price three things and only three: an aircraft in the air, a flare burnt, a ground generator running.

A typical winter agreement in this pile commits an operator to a stated number of seasonal flight hours at a stated hourly rate, plus consumables at cost plus a margin, plus a mobilisation fee. The operator invoices monthly against a log.

Nowhere does a dollar move because water arrived. Dr. Talia Brenninkmeyer-Osei, who reviewed our reading, disputes one word of it — she would not call the arrangement unmeasured, since the flight hours are measured to the minute. She is right, and it is the point. Everything in the contract is measured. The thing the public thinks it is buying is the one quantity that is not in it.

Paid to stand down

The suspension criteria are the reason the word attempt keeps appearing.

Every contract in the pile suspends operations under stated conditions: downstream flood risk, existing snowpack above a threshold, avalanche advisories, air traffic restrictions, temperatures outside the window in which silver iodide does anything at all.

Across the nineteen contracts whose logs we hold, operators stood down 38 per cent of otherwise eligible hours over three seasons. Downstream flood risk accounts for most of it.

They were paid for standing by, at a reduced standby rate, in every one of the nineteen.

That looks like the worst fact in this story and it is close to the opposite. An operator paid by the flying hour, with no standby provision, has a reason to fly into the four days he ought not to. The man who chairs the body that writes those criteria explains at the foot of this page, at length, what happened in 1972 when one did.

The manager who reads clause 4 aloud

Delphine Aguirre-Stott runs a western water district that holds two of the forty-one. She had the contract open on the boardroom table before our correspondent had finished the question.

"Page four," she said. "It says we are not buying precipitation. I read that to my board every year in public and I put it in the packet."

Her board buys the season, she says, the way it buys insurance — an option against a dry year, bought at a price the district can carry in a wet one. She has been asked repeatedly for an audit showing what the money produced.

"I can't give them one," she said. "Nobody can. If somebody solves that, I will be the first customer."

Nothing was hidden

All forty-one contracts arrived inside the statutory period. One came back by return of post, with the clerk's own pencil note giving the page number of the clause we had asked about. Three operators sent their flight logs without being asked.

The effect sizes from thirty-one randomised trials that this desk assembled last year are in the Vault at PX-1986, and they are why the argument about whether seeding works cannot be settled from a contract.

The one thing worth assembling

There is a concentration here, and it took a diagram rather than a document.

Six firms hold all forty-one contracts. The suspension standard that thirty-eight of those contracts incorporate by reference is written by a trade council, and that council is chaired by Ewart Cassin, whose nine-person works in Nebraska makes most of the flares those same contracts are billed in.

None of that is secret. The membership list is published, the minutes are online, and the chairmanship is unpaid. It is simply the case that the man who writes the rule about when to burn a flare also sells the flare.

His answer runs below and is the best thing on this page. What this desk takes from it is narrower than what will be quoted from it: an industry that sells attempts, prices them by the hour, says so in writing to buyers who read it — and a standards body of four hundred people who all sell something, which is not a cover-up but is not nothing either.