The Colorado River is critical for Arizona. Its water comes out of kitchen faucets amid the suburban sprawl of the Phoenix area and is used to grow crops under the desert sun. But it starts hundreds of miles away, as snow in the Rocky Mountains.
For years, a major Arizona water agency has been part of efforts to boost that snow through cloud seeding. Now, leaders of that agency are considering pulling funding from the program amid high tensions between states that share the Colorado River.
Cloud seeding is a technology that can help add snow in critical high-mountain watersheds by releasing particles into the air that cannot create snow, but can essentially tell it where to fall…