A Vancouver-based weather modification startup, Skyward Wildfire, claims it can prevent catastrophic wildfires in the future by stopping the lightning strikes that start them. It recently secured millions of dollars in funding, which it plans to use to accelerate the development of its technology and expand its operations.
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Lightning causes nearly 60% of wildfires — and these outbreaks were responsible for 93% of the total area burned.
Until last week, the company—which points to the role lightning played in the 2023 wildfires—reported on its website that it had demonstrated technology capable of preventing “up to 100% of lightning strikes.” That claim was impressive, and far beyond the level of certainty of researchers who have studied the potential for human intervention to suppress lightning—and it retracted it after questions from MIT Technology Review.
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Now, the company says it has demonstrated that it “can prevent the majority of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in targeted thunderstorms.” So far, Skyward has not publicly disclosed how it achieves this, and in response to questions about it, the company has limited itself to stating that the materials used are “inert and selected according to regulatory standards.”
However, online documents suggest that the company is relying on a method that US government agencies began evaluating as early as the early 1960s: "seeding" clouds with metal shavings (chaff) or thin fiberglass fibers coated with aluminum.
If Skyward were able to reliably apply this technique on a large scale, it could be a powerful tool for addressing the increasing risk of wildfires as climate change raises temperatures, dries out forests and likely increases the frequency of lightning.
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However, researchers and environmental observers point out that many uncertainties remain, such as how effective the vaccination would be under different weather and climate conditions, how much material would be required, how often the procedure would have to be carried out, as well as what secondary environmental impacts could result from lightning suppression on a commercial scale.
