Skyward’s diagrams show planes dropping particles into clouds to prevent cloud-to-ground lightning in “high-risk areas”. The company also notes in the document that it uses artificial intelligence for a number of purposes, including predicting lightning storms, prioritizing treatment, targeting storm cells and optimizing flight paths.
Hartrey emphasized that the company will deploy the technology judiciously and reserve it for storm events with wildfire risk, saying such storms are responsible for less than 0.1% of lightning activity in a given area.
He said, “Our objective is to reduce the likelihood of fires occurring on a limited number of high-risk days when fires threaten life, critical infrastructure and ecosystems, and when suppression costs and impacts can rapidly increase.”
The document posted by the World Bank states that Skyward partnered with Alberta Wildfire in August 2024 to “prove suppression by aircraft and drones”, and that its process produced a “60-100% reduction” in power compared to “control cells” (which presumably meant storm cells that were not seeded).
The document says the company will conduct additional field testing in the summer of 2025 with wildfire agencies in British Columbia and Alberta “to provide landscape level solutions with more advanced aircraft, sensors and forecasts.”
“The BC Wildfire Service is aware that Skyward is developing technology aimed at reducing the incidence of lightning strikes in targeted situations,” the British Columbia agency acknowledged in a statement. MIT Technology Review. “Last year, initial trials were conducted by Skyward to gain a better understanding of the technology and its applicability in BC. Should a project/technology like this move forward in BC, we will engage with the project team in an effort to learn and ensure that we are using every tool available to us to respond to wildfires in BC”
The BC agency declined to make anyone available for interviews and did not answer questions about what materials were used, where the tests were conducted, or whether it provided public disclosures or was required by the company. Alberta Wildfire did not respond to similar questions. MIT Technology Review.
The risk of lightning is increasing
Clouds are just water in various forms – vapor, droplets and ice crystals, which condense so much that they can form the floating Rorschach tests we see in the sky. Within them, snowflakes and tiny ice balls known as graupels rub together, causing atoms to exchange electrons. This process creates highly reactive ions with negative and positive charges.
The updraft separates the lighter ice cubes from the graupel, creating a large difference in charges in the electric field…crack! Electrostatic discharge occurs in the form of lightning.
