China Modifies Weather For 2008 Olympics

BRock97 writes: "An article in the August 5th issue of Newsweek describes the steps the Chinese are taking to ensure a perfect forecast for the 2008 Olympics. This includes shutting down factories that are pumping pollution into the atmosphere to increasing the number of trees planted to reduce dust and erosion (need to spread these kind of ideas world wide!). The interesting aspect, though, is all the research and development into using rockets and furnaces to modify the atmosphere and create the weather that would be optimal for the games. By heating the air or dumping cloud condensation nuclei into the atmosphere, various types of weather can be achieved. Seems that they have had success as far back as 1987, creating rain to help put out a raging forest fire. Cool stuff from a weather nerd standpoint."