Meteoric, a two-person company backed by Y Combinator, says it will deploy autonomous drones to disperse clouds above solar farms and eventually weaken hurricanes. The San Francisco startup has yet to prove the idea works outside a laboratory chamber.
The venture announced plans in August 2026 for a large-scale cloud-clearing test over a solar installation in 2027, followed by storm operations the year after. Co-founder Mete Karslioglu, who previously worked on marine cloud brightening nozzles at the Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair, said the company's drones can boost solar output by 10 to 30 percent annually without chemicals. His partner, microfluidics specialist Eric Nilsson, rounds out the team.
So far, Meteoric has demonstrated a 13 percent reduction of an artificial cloud in a controlled chamber. That single data point supports projections the company claims could deliver $5,000 to $28,000 in added value per megawatt-year of solar capacity. None of these figures have been validated in real-world conditions, and the startup has not disclosed how its drones physically alter cloud structure or how it will measure net energy gains after accounting for the electricity the drones themselves consume.
"Our drones clear clouds over solar farms to increase their annual output by 10–30% without using any chemicals," Karslioglu wrote in a post this summer. "Ultimate target: weaken severe storms and hurricanes."
The promise arrives at a moment when solar developers are hungry for yield improvements. Global photovoltaic capacity reached roughly 2.96 terawatts by the end of 2025, the International Energy Agency's Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme reported in 2026. In the United States alone, 773 gigawatts of solar sat in interconnection queues at the end of last year, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported in June. Only a small share of queued projects historically reach operation, the lab noted, but the sheer volume underscores pressure to extract more energy from existing assets.
Overcast skies can slash solar irradiance to 30 or 40 percent of clear-sky levels, a 60 to 70 percent drop, according to an Environmental Protection Agency synthesis covering studies from 2004 to 2018. A 2018 observational study in São Paulo reported a median 72 percent reduction under low overcast. Meteoric's business model claims regional annual uplifts ranging from 10 percent in the Pacific Northwest to 30 percent in New York ISO territory, with intermediate gains elsewhere. The company said it targets low- to mid-level clouds between one and five kilometers altitude. Independent verification of any of this remains absent.
The Regulatory Maze
Flying drones into or near clouds at those altitudes requires waivers from multiple Federal Aviation Administration rules. Part 107 restricts small drones to 400 feet above ground level and mandates visual line of sight, with minimum cloud clearances of 500 feet below and 2,000 feet horizontally. Operations beyond visual line of sight, at higher altitudes, within clouds, and with multiple simultaneous aircraft all fall outside routine permissions.
The FAA published a notice of proposed rulemaking in August 2025 to normalize beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations. The comment period reopened in January 2026, and the agency denied extension requests in September. No final rule has yet been issued. The Government Accountability Office said in March the FAA needs better planning for detect-and-avoid systems and communications infrastructure that large-scale autonomous flight will require.
Any intentional modification of the atmosphere also triggers the Weather Modification Reporting Act of 1972 and its implementing regulations, which require operators to file reports with NOAA's Commerce Department at least ten days before activities begin. State-level permits add another layer. Texas requires a license and permit for weather modification, and hail-suppression projects there need local voter approval, according to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
Meteoric's "no chemicals" framing does not exempt the company from oversight. Physically altering cloud microphysics falls under federal and state reporting requirements regardless of method, legal experts have noted.
Drones, Weather Modification, and a Checkered History
Meteoric enters a small but growing field of companies testing drone-based atmospheric interventions. Rainmaker Technology conducted a drone cloud-seeding season in Utah and Idaho early in 2025, dispersing roughly 8.6 kilograms of silver iodide, Utah's Division of Water Resources reported in September. The Washington Post profiled Rainmaker in April as the first U.S. company to use drones for cloud seeding, noting the pilots have faced FAA and aviation-safety scrutiny.
Field trials at an Indian airport reported in a 2026 Springer journal article that UAV swarms achieved 83 percent faster fog clearance compared to a chemical-seeding baseline. The trial was site-specific and early-stage. China's meteorological administration reported large-scale drone-seeding operations last year, according to the South China Morning Post, though independent validation of effectiveness has not been published.
Traditional aircraft- and ground-based silver-iodide programs have operated across North America for decades. NOAA's 2017–2020 SNOWIE program estimated 100 to 275 acre-feet of precipitation generated in three seeding events, according to a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. Marine cloud brightening research has advanced with Great Barrier Reef field trials documented in peer-reviewed papers, though these programs aim to reflect more sunlight, the opposite of Meteoric's cloud-clearing goal. None have demonstrated large-scale climatic effects.
NOAA itself integrated data from small Black Swift S0 drones into its operational hurricane forecast models this season, the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory announced in May. That work focuses on improving forecasts, not modifying storms.
The Hurricane Problem
Meteoric's longer-term hurricane ambition faces a steep scientific climb. The World Meteorological Organization said in its June 2025 statement on weather modification that while evidence supports modifying cloud microstructure under some conditions, "no generally accepted evidence" exists that tropical cyclones can be modified. The WMO urged rigorous randomized evaluations and cautioned against overclaiming impacts.
That stance reflects lessons from Project STORMFURY, the U.S. government's 1962–1983 hurricane-seeding experiments. NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory later described the program's results as unsupported by evidence. Decades of inconclusive work left researchers wary of bold claims about storm weakening.
AI-driven weather models such as DeepMind's GraphCast, published in Science in November 2023, can produce ten-day forecasts in under a minute and outperform traditional models on roughly 90 percent of targets. Whether machine-learning forecast speed can help Meteoric identify treatable clouds and validate performance remains an open question with no published answer.
Governance Questions Loom Large
Broader solar radiation modification and geoengineering proposals have drawn caution from international bodies. The United Nations Environment Programme's 2023 "One Atmosphere" report urged better governance of such technologies. The European Union's Group of Chief Scientific Advisors recommended in December 2024 an EU-wide moratorium on solar radiation modification deployment while pursuing research on impacts. The Overshoot Commission said in September 2023 that any large outdoor experiments or deployment should face a moratorium pending more research and governance dialogue.
The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine called in 2021 for a research program with guardrails. Climate Central tallied twelve billion-dollar disasters in the first half of this year costing approximately $31.9 billion, illustrating the financial stakes that make weather modification attractive and contentious in roughly equal measure.
What Meteoric Faces Now
The startup has targeted 2027 for its first large-scale outdoor cloud-clearing test. Meeting that timeline depends on securing FAA waivers for beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight, altitude, cloud clearance, and multi-aircraft operations. The company declined to disclose funding, customers, or named investors in its launch materials.
Independent measurement and verification will determine whether the modeled 10 to 30 percent solar uplift translates to real megawatt-hour gains. The WMO's 2025 guidance calls for randomized, well-instrumented evaluation designs with statistical confidence intervals. Meteoric's chamber test has not yet met that standard. Any credible field demonstration will need cloud-property sensors, irradiance measurements at solar plants, correlations with plant supervisory control systems, and third-party analysis.
For now, Karslioglu and Nilsson are betting that drone autonomy, machine-learning weather prediction, and eventual regulatory approval will converge by the time their first drones take flight. The Energy Information Administration said in February it expects another record year of utility-scale solar additions in 2026, which should keep the pipeline of potential customers growing.
Whether clouds prove easier to clear than the regulatory and scientific hurdles ahead is the company's central uncertainty. The chamber results offer a proof of concept, nothing more. The rest remains to be demonstrated in skies that are considerably less cooperative than a laboratory.
