Drones hold secret to producing more rain, engineers say

Amid perpetual drought, population growth, and trillions of gallons of water used in desert agriculture, much of America's West is in desperate need of more rain and snow.

A team of engineers at a Southern California tech company say they believe drones could be part of a solution.

The team at Rainmaker says drones are the most precise and cost-effective way of cloud seeding, a process that uses molecules of silver iodide to attract water droplets and enhance the amount rain and snow that falls.

To produce more rain than would occur naturally, Rainmaker sends a drone into a cloud that is not yet producing rain or snow and releases silver iodide -- an ice nucleating molecule -- from the drone.

"Over the course of hours, we can produce millions of gallons of new precipitation," Rainmaker founder and CEO Augustus Doricko told ABC News' Ginger Zee at the company's California warehouse.

"We can produce less than a tenth of an inch over hundreds of miles at a time," he said. "But if we do that a couple dozen times over the winter, that's a meaningful amount of snowpack that flows into our reservoirs and rivers and streams."

Doricko said the company plans to take advantage of this season's strong El Nino weather pattern in an effort to make the upcoming season their biggest yet.

"Our aspiration this winter is to produce more water from cloud seeding -- measurable, provably man-made water -- than all of the desalination capacity of California combined," he said.

The company is also testing an option to silver iodide, though experts say the silver is not dangerous to humans.

The only part of silver iodide that makes it to the ground and into streams is the silver, which is a naturally occurring metal, according to Bart Geerts, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming.

"Within the streams, it typically is non-measurable impact," Geerts, who is not involved with Rainmaker, told ABC News. "So, from the perspective of air quality or human health, the impacts are insignificant."

Doricko said a major goal for Rainmaker is to ensure the United States becomes a global leader in weather modification technology.

"It's critically important that the U.S. develops and wins the frontier of this tech," he said, noting that China and other countries are investing heavily in the technology.