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UK Team to Study Rainmaking Machines
RobertB-DC writes "The BBC reports that a Edinburgh University team has received a grant to research Wind-Powered Rainmaking Machines. You have to have winds blowing towards a mountainous coastline, but the article says that the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf are well-suited. For a cautionary note, though, the BBC includes a link to the story of a 1952 cloud-seeding experiment gone terribly wrong."
I guess the US has already tried to use this as a weapon. I came across this article where rain making was used in Vietnam. The UN has also already banned the use of weather control as a weapon. So much for the weather machine in Command and Conquer.
There are other consequences to irrigation as well. Take, for example, the state of the Great Plains aquifer, which underlies Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and in fact most of the middle of the country. Aquifers are a resource in a delicate balance between the amount of water withdrawn and the amount of water recharged from streams and precipitation soaking into the ground.
:-(
Currently we are withdrawing water from the Great Plains aquifer about twice as fast as it is being replenished. My geology book from last year claimed it'll be used up in another 10-15 years. If that happens, some MAJOR changes are going to result. We'll have to decrease agricultural production to about 25% of current levels -- not enough water to plant the crops as densely as we hvae been. Cattle ranching will suffer, too -- not enough water to maintain the current herds.
This process is only being exacerbated by the prolonged drought throughout the western half of the country. Remember the Hayman fire in Colorado last summer? And the literally hundreds of other fires? That's because the entire region is as dry as a bone: we haven't been getting normal precipitation levels. Colorado (which is my home state) lost about three quarters of the crops that were planted this year due to the drought. Mandatory watering restrictions were in place all summer, and have already been announced for next year.
Then, of course, there are going to be some pretty severe economic repercussions. For a state whose primary industry is agriculture, a 75% decrease in crop yields, be it because of unusual drought or a depleted aquifer, is HUGE. Food prices -- especially for energy-intensive products like beef -- will go up. People will not be happy.
It's a mess.
It is very very hard to seed clouds. You've got to get the silver iodide (or whatever) concentration just right- too many condensation nuclei and all you get is suspended fog. Too few, and the dropplets grow too slowly (collision is a major growth process). There've been many attempts over the years, but it is really really hard to prove correlation in the wild.. (send refs if you know otherwise!)
You seem quite scheptyc about rainmaking. Well, Russian government disclosed that it used several technologies for local weather control. There was even a program on TV about this. That confirmed the old suspicions people had about the strange weather changes during holidays in Soviet Union. For several years, people noted that if rain was about to come to Moscow in 1st of May, then as magic, clouds would disappear. However there was a side effect, as, somewhere around Moscow rain would fall like in the tropics. This was always considered as popular fantasy. However, this summer, a TV program showed one of the crews specially prepared for those missions. They showed nearly everything, from preparing the ingredients up to seeding the clouds. In an interview, one guy told that they were doing it since the 50's and there was already a whole science behind it, from how to stop rain up to how to make it fall. There were side effects dangers and whole models to avoid certain critical situations. There were several types of ingredients on use. Silver iodide occurred to be one of the least used. The most popular was... concrete powder.They say it is tremendously effective.