🌧️ How Drones can Modify the Weather

The world is running out of freshwater. From shrinking aquifers to vanishing rivers, the story of global water scarcity has long been one of loss. Augustus Doricko and the team at Rainmaker are changing that story.

Not with desalination plants or new dams, but by working with the weather itself.

Their approach? A scalable, drone-based system that encourages natural rainfall and snowfall - refilling aquifers, replenishing lakes, and restoring local water cycles where it’s needed most.

“What we are doing at Rainmaker is very complex. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we are building four deep-tech companies under one roof. But at the same time, the big picture is very simple: the world is running out of freshwater, and that touches everything. Our food, our forests, our economy, and our kids’ future,” explains their CEO, Augustus Doricko.

Drone-Based Approach

For decades, cloud seeding has relied on manned aircraft - an approach that’s expensive, limited in scale, and environmentally inefficient.

Rainmaker’s model replaces those planes with fleets of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can deliver seeding agents with far greater precision and at a fraction of the cost.

“Manned aircraft have been used in cloud seeding for decades, but they’re expensive, they burn a lot of fuel, and you can only fly so many,” Augustus explains. “With drones, we can fly more missions, deliver seeding agents with high precision, and cover more area.”

The economics are staggering: UAV seeding missions require two orders of magnitude less capex, and three orders of magnitude less opex, compared to manned aviation.

Advances in radar, forecasting, and drone tech have made it all feasible - what Augustus calls “a water delivery system that was impossible until the last few years.”

Rainmaker’s drones even operate in severe icing conditions that grounded manned aircraft can’t touch. “Our drones are equipped with an icing protection system we developed in-house, which allows us to seed in the most severe icing conditions that exist – conditions where manned aircraft simply cannot safely fly.” 

Augustus highlights this as just one example of how a drone-based approach lets us achieve radical precision and a higher yield than manned approaches.

A Blueprint for Water Abundance

Access to water underpins everything from national security to food sovereignty. Yet, while energy and carbon have dominated policy debates for decades, water infrastructure has lagged behind.

Rainmaker’s approach positions weather modification as a new form of civic infrastructure, one that could transform how nations plan for resilience in a warming world.

“Cloud seeding gives nations and communities a way to boost supply within their own borders,” he says. “That reduces the potential for future conflict over water, or migration crises caused by failing food systems.”

Rather than international treaties, Augustus sees a future with less conflict, where food and water can be grown and accessed locally without strain. “When every country has a path to water abundance, you won’t see the same flashpoints that arise from scarcity,” he says.

Of course there are larger questions about how weather modification might play out on the global stage as the practice scales, but Augustus hopes that more water availability in the near-term can reduce geopolitical frictions and empower nations to be increasingly self-sufficient.

From Concept to Climate Infrastructure

Since Augustus’ first joined us at the HackSummit in December 2024, Rainmaker launched the second-largest cloud seeding program in history in the Bear River Basin in Utah and Idaho. 

“That’s a huge shift from ‘this is weird and promising’ to ‘this is happening right now.’ While we are operationally excellent and have successfully built an n-of-1 tech stack in about two years, now comes the really interesting part.”

Rainmaker are bringing more snowpack to the Bear River Basin. But the bigger picture is that they are continuing to develop a validation systems during this program, giving them the ability to prove exactly how much surplus precipitation they make in each seeding mission.

“It unlocks a path to scale Rainmaker as a one-of-a-kind water utility,” Augustus says, “unlike anything the world has ever seen.”

Defining Success

For Augustus, the vision isn’t just about numbers — it’s about the impact people can feel.

“Success means communities actually feeling the difference. More water in reservoirs, more snowpack, healthier farms, aquifers recharging, fewer gigafires. We’ll measure it in gallons, but also in the trust we earn from farmers, cities, and agencies who know they can count on us.”

He draws a parallel to one of humanity’s most ambitious missions: “Just as people rooted for NASA to put a man on the moon, I want folks rooting for Rainmaker to bring water to the world.”

In the next few years, Augustus’ goal is bold but clear: to make Rainmaker the biggest single producer of freshwater in America - full stop.