Glaciogenic cloud seeding potential of cold-season orographic clouds in a warming climate over the mountains in western Wyoming

The climate change impacts on the glaciogenic seeding potential of clouds over mountains in the Interior Western US are discussed by analyzing 10 years of convection-permitting regional climate model outputs in the retrospective (center in 2010) and future climate (center in 2060). The future climate represents conditions around ~2060 assuming the IPCC RCP8.5 scenario. The climate change signals from CMIP5 ensemble simulations are imposed on the retrospective boundary conditions using the Pseudo-Global Warming technique. Using the mountains in western Wyoming as an example, we look at how the factors such as temperature, cloud liquid water path, and static stability impact ground-based and airborne cloud seeding in the global warming scenario. Changes in blocking/unblocking frequencies manifested by the Froude number are analyzed. Since blocked flow requires seeding from an aircraft and unblocking allows the usage of a network of ground-based generators, cloud seeding techniques may need to be adapted for climate change. Finally, to quantify changes in seeding impact in a warmer climate, we simulate seeding-induced vs. natural precipitation amount for one winter of actual ground-based seeding over the Wind River Range (2014-2015), and compare this to the same scenario in a warmer climate (2064-2065).