Last year was the driest year in recorded history for many areas of California and conditions have yet to improve in 2014, according to recent snow surveys. The state has ramped up efforts to induce rainfall through a controversial weather modification technology known as cloud seeding. Cloud seeding involves spraying fine particles of silver iodide into a cloud system, which causes water droplets in the clouds to form ice crystals that grow larger and turn into snowflakes. In 2005, John Marburger, President George W. Bush's primary science and technology advisor, requested that Senator Kay Hutchison from Texas defer consideration of proposed legislation that would have established a federal cloud seeding program. [But] California state agencies appear to have embraced cloud seeding as a cost-effective strategy for mitigating the impacts of a severe and prolonged drought. Critics have claimed for years that cloud seeding was widely used by electric utilities and ski area operators. For example, Sacramento Municipal Utility District has reportedly hired pilots to seed clouds over areas where additional snowfall would enhance their hydroelectric operations. The California Department of Water Resources, which [supplies] water to 25 million Californians and roughly 750,000 acres of irrigated farmland, estimated cloud seeding projects generate 400,000 acre-feet of additional water supply annually in the state. It is unclear whether [California] has the legal right to take water from other regions by artificially inducing precipitation. It is also unclear whether the technology is safe.