The ships atomize and aerosolize seawater, adding moisture to the atmosphere. GPS position history and Doppler RADAR demonstrates that they are routinely used to super-charge hurricanes. Shane Buell also discovered the tanker’s names are frequently changed, as they are moved about to affect various weather modification efforts. The company developing the beta versions of the “eco”/green version call it “CLOUD BRIGHTENING”. Other versions are detailed below.
Atomizing Aerosolizers of Seawater for the purpose of Superchaging Hurricanes / Weather Modification is mentioned here among other articles —
Below are the other known / documented ship-based aerosol systems (real and proposed) whose stated job is to spray seawater or other material into the marine atmosphere to alter clouds, add vapor/aerosol to the air, cool ocean surfaces, or influence storms. These are not just fire monitors. They’re engineered atomizers.
1. Great Barrier Reef “cloud brightening” spray vessels (“Big Daddy and the Twins”)
A research fleet operating off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been fitted with high-pressure seawater pumps, air compressors, and racks holding hundreds of fine atomizer nozzles. Each vessel sucks in seawater, pressurizes it, and blasts it upward through these nozzles, creating a dense artificial fog plume that drifts downwind and merges into a continuous white veil above the water. The stated goal is to brighten and thicken low marine clouds so they reflect more sunlight, which shades and cools the reef surface and reduces coral-bleaching heat stress. (Pulitzer Center)
The plumes in these trials are not decorative water arcs. Observers described them as erupting “with all the drama of a volcanic-ash plume,” coming off a ~20-foot-wide nozzle grid at the stern of the main boat, with two smaller barges alongside doing the same spray. In February field runs around Australia’s Palm Islands, the three-vessel group (“Big Daddy and the Twins”) produced long white aerosol strands that fused into what looked like a single manmade cloud deck at low altitude. (Pulitzer Center)
Southern Cross University says this “marine cloud brightening” method is explicitly about weather modification on demand: spray seawater up, generate brighter whiter clouds above a target area, block solar heating of that patch of ocean, and keep coral alive during extreme heat waves. They describe it as regional, on/off, and repeatable, not just theory — they have already done multi-day trials on the reef starting in 2020 and continuing through 2025. (Southern Cross University)
2. High-density seawater micronizers (effervescent atomizing nozzles)
The Australian group’s hardware has now evolved into dense arrays of “effervescent” atomizing nozzles. Each nozzle mixes high-pressure seawater with high-pressure compressed air, shattering the stream into sub-micron and tens-of-nanometer droplets. Measurements show individual nozzles producing around 10¹²–10¹³ salt particles per second with a typical dried particle size centered near ~40 nm diameter — exactly the size range climate modelers say is most effective at brightening marine stratocumulus clouds. (researchportal.scu.edu.au)
Scaling data from recent field work: 640 of these nozzles ran at once and drew ~345 kW total (~540 W per nozzle). The team projects that full-scale “spraying sources” will need on the order of 10⁴ to 10⁵ nozzles in parallel plus machinery capable of delivering roughly 4 kilograms per second of compressed air and an equal mass flow of high-pressure seawater. In other words, this is already in the tanker / industrial barge energy class, not a toy fogger. (researchportal.scu.edu.au)
This is the exact class of atomizer you’d bolt to a workboat, barge, or bunker-fuel support ship and run continuously offshore to manufacture an aerosol plume that can loft, seed clouds, and locally change incoming sunlight and surface heat budget. The stated application is both reef saving and regional cooling. (Pulitzer Center)
3. CARI (Cloud-Aerosol Research Instrument) – University of Washington / MCB Program
In parallel, the Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) program based at the University of Washington built a ship-deployable cannon-style ring of multiple effervescent spray nozzles called CARI. The design goal is to generate an aerosol plume with 10¹⁵–10¹⁶ sea-salt particles per second in the 10–200 nm range (ideal peak ~30–60 nm), and to make that plume buoyant enough that it rises through the marine boundary layer and reaches cloud base. That matches the “brighten low clouds / increase reflectivity / cool the ocean patch under them” mission profile. (UW Faculty)
CARI is built specifically to test aerosol–cloud interactions in the real marine atmosphere: you put the instrument on a vessel, spray optimized salt aerosol, then sample the plume downwind with aircraft, drones, and met sensors to confirm how efficiently those manmade particles climb, mix, and alter droplet counts in the overhead cloud deck. This is a direct, engineered aerosolizer for maritime weather modification experiments — it’s literally a purpose-built sea-salt atomizer array for ships. (UW Faculty)
4. Salter / Latham autonomous spray ships (Flettner-rotor “cloud brightening tankers”)
Engineer Stephen Salter and cloud physicist John Latham designed unmanned, GPS/satellite-guided spray ships whose only job is to steam around selected ocean boxes and pump ultra-fine seawater aerosol vertically into the air, full time. The hull concept is roughly 45 meters waterline length, ~90 tonnes displacement, with tall spinning Flettner rotors for wind-driven propulsion instead of sails. Beneath the hull, variable-pitch hydrofoils flap in the swell to harvest wave energy; Salter’s published spec says about 300 kW of usable power for both propulsion assist and spray generation. (Royal Society Publishing)
Those ships are drawn with multiple vertical stacks ejecting continuous white plumes upward — not decorative smoke, but engineered submicron seawater droplets meant to seed/cloud up the marine boundary layer and raise cloud albedo. In other words: an unmanned aerosol tanker. (ResearchGate)
Salter and Latham estimated you’d need on the order of 1,500 such spray vessels globally to get planet-scale cooling, but they also described targeted / regional missions: park a few of these units in specific current paths or hurricane breeding zones to cool sea-surface temperatures by casting a persistent bright cloud shield overhead. That’s explicitly framed as both climate control and hurricane suppression — generate reflective cloud decks over warm water before storms spin up. (Atmospheric and Climate Science)
5. Hurricane / storm-modification barges with jet-engine plume injectors
Separate from salt-spray cloud brightening, there’s another ship-class proposal aimed at changing storms directly: mount surplus high-thrust jet engines vertically on barges or ships in front of a forming hurricane. The engines blast compressible, high-speed exhaust jets straight upward, forcing huge columns of warm, humid boundary-layer air to rise and triggering controlled “anthropogenic tropical cyclones” ahead of the real hurricane. The idea is to strip heat (enthalpy) out of the sea surface, rough up the atmosphere, and weaken or divert the incoming hurricane before landfall.
That same hardware concept assumes multiple engine barges patrolling known hurricane corridors, continuously injecting forced plumes, manufacturing organized updraft cells, and cooling the ocean skin layer in advance. The proposal explicitly treats this as deliberate weather modification using oceangoing platforms.
Summary:
- Reef/MCB spray boats (Australia) – working now: high-pressure seawater + compressed air through hundreds of micronizing nozzles, making dense artificial fog that drifts upward and brightens clouds to locally cool water. (Pulitzer Center)
- CARI-class ship cannons (University of Washington) – ship-mountable rings of tuned effervescent nozzles pushing 10¹⁵–10¹⁶ sub-200 nm salt particles/sec for controlled plume → cloud response studies. (UW Faculty)
- Salter/Latham autonomous spray ships – unmanned Flettner-rotor “aerosol tankers,” ~45 m hulls generating ~300 kW to atomize seawater nonstop into the marine boundary layer, proposed in fleets to brighten clouds, cool regions, and even weaken hurricanes. (Royal Society Publishing)
- Jet-engine hurricane barges – multiple retired jet engines mounted on ships/barges to inject giant vertical plumes ahead of a storm, with the stated aim of altering storm intensity and track.
These are the documented ocean platforms whose core function is atmospheric injection (salt aerosol or heated jet plumes) for weather / storm / cloud modification, not just firefighting spray.