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."

Comments

screwing with weather?

[sickmtbnutcase]

"People have been trying for many years to modify the weather, from tribal rain dances through to experiments in which small crystals were dropped into clouds to attract moisture."

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but to me the weather the past few years hasn't seemed quite normal to begin with. Floods and heavy rain where it normally doesn't rain much, tornados in odd parts of the country, lack of snow where there's usually plenty....So why would we want to modify it by adding extra moisture in the air and making it rain in places which normally receive little rain to begin with? What would be the effects a few hundred miles away? Really, what's wrong with normal irrigation? It works, and doesn't affect the weather.

I dunno

[Reality Master 101]

North Devon experienced 250 times the normal August rainfall in 1952. [...] She recalls: "Mum identified her by this huge wart on her back because she hadn't got no head, or arms, or legs when they found her".

I hate to be skeptical, but... the article seems to imply that this rain making experiment caused all this water to suddenly fall out of the sky. But what makes my "bullshit" meter go off is whether there is that much water in the air in the first place. I mean, 250 times the normal rainfall? I could see if you had some natural storm system come in that just happened to have a ton of moisture, but just to create out of "thin air" (so to speak) that much water out of normal conditions just doesn't sound plausible.

Particularly since if it were that easy, we would never have droughts.

Something isn't adding up here.

Stealing rain?

[stefanlasiewski]

Hrm...

If you force the rain to come down, NOW, RIGHT HERE, aren't you preventing the rain from falling on your neighbors? What if there is a drought and the neighbors need the rain?