02 Jun Telluride Science Town Talks: #1, “Can We Change The Weather?,” 6/9!
This coming week the 2026 Telluride Science Town Talks series begins with “Can We Change The Weather.” The event features Dr. Derek Posselt and takes place Tuesday, June 9. Doors 6 p.m.; talk, 6:30- 7:30 p.m..
Town Talks are FREE and open to the public.
Visit telluridescience.org to learn more about Telluride Science and the capital campaign to transform the historic Telluride Depot into the Telluride Science & Innovation Center. The venue is the permanent home for Telluride Science and a global hub of inspired knowledge exchange and development where great minds get to solve great challenges.
The 2026 Telluride Science Town Talks series is presented by Alpine Bank with additional support from the Telluride Mountain Village Owner’s Association.
Go here for more about Telluride Science.
Go here for more on Town Talks.
Living in the mountains, we think about the weather constantly. Weather that changes on a dime and/or doesn’t come on time.
We’ve all prayed for powder and gotten bare slopes.
Watched hail flatten your garden in July.
Hiked to a creek that had completely dried up.
No doubt, the weather is getting stranger. More extreme. But what if we could actually control the whims of Mother Nature?
Be careful what you wish for…
On June 9th, NASA scientist Dr. Derek Posselt is scheduled to deliver a Town Talk titled “Can We Change the Weather?” He will walk us through the strange history of human beings attempts to control the skies using various tactics: military explosives to break up thunderstorms; steering tornados away from their targets; and cloud seeding, which is all about introducing aerosols into Great Beyond to trigger precipitation. (Most commonly silver iodide, which mimics the structure of ice.)
Dr. Derek will also address the most urgent questions in atmospheric science today: Can we change the weather and, perhaps more importantly, should we?
According to Posselt, the key to that key question is the aforementioned aerosols: microscopic particles that float in the atmosphere such as dust, pollen, pollution, sea salt.
Truth is these aerosols are everywhere and they determine how clouds form, how much it rains, and how much sunlight gets reflected back into space. Get the aerosols right, and you might be able to trigger rainfall, brighten clouds, even cool the planet.
So if aerosol-cloud interaction is our best tool for changing the climate for the good that should be simple enough to manage, right?
Not quite…
Tinkering with clouds sets off competing effects that are hard to predict and even harder to control.
Seed a thunderstorm to reduce hail, and you might actually make the storm stronger.
Seed clouds on one side of a mountain, and you could be stealing rainfall from the farm on the other side.
The law of unintended consequences is always operating in the atmosphere.
So whether or not we should attempt to change the weather remains on the table.
Come to the Town Talk to hear Dr. Derek weigh in on the subject.
Dr. Derek Posselt, more:
Image, courtesy Dr. Posselt
Dr. Derek Posselt is a research scientist with the Atmospheric Physics and Weather group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, and a visiting researcher at UCLA.
He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University.
Posselt has 18 years of experience in satellite data and mission development and has served on science teams for NASA’s CYGNSS, CloudSat, and Aerosols Clouds Ecosystems missions.
He is currently an editor at the Monthly Weather Review and a member of the AMS Probability and Statistics Committee.
Lucja Barker, more:
Lucja
Lucja Barker grew up in Telluride and Los Angeles. She studies environmental science and political journalism at NYU. And is delighted and honored to be working as an intern at the Telluride Science Center this summer.
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