Sorooshian Discusses Cloud Seeding on KJZZ's The Show

CHEE professor Armin Sorooshian appeared on the July 14 episode of KJZZ's The Show to discuss cloud seeding, or the effort to change the amount of precipitation that falls from clouds. While Sorooshian doesn't study cloud seeding specifically, his research is focused on aerosol particles and how they interact with clouds in the Earth's atmosphere.

"Clouds are not just  made of pure liquid droplets," he explained. "Droplets need to have a seed to form on and those are these particles, like dust, smoke, things like soot."

He discussed how silver iodide has been used as a seeder to encourage the formation of high-altitude, snow-producing clouds. Lower clouds made of liquid droplets can be seeded with sea salt. Sorooshian is the principal investigator of ACTIVATE, a NASA mission to investigate cloud-aerosol interactions and cloud formation over the western Atlantic. 

"We've got a couple of airplanes flying off the east coast to trying to go in and around clouds to build one of the largest data sets ever, honestly to understand how particles and clouds interact with each other," he said. "The implications of what we're doing have a lot to do with our understanding of things like cloud deeding, because, ultimately, we're understanding how particles that naturally are in the air are affecting clouds, so that helps understand a little better how cloud seeding could potentially work."

Listen to the full interview on the July 14 episode of The Show. Sorooshian's segment begins at 43:50.