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

Cool.

[Hawthorne01]

This is good news for my grant application to deploy a sand-making machine in Algeria.

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.

Re:screwing with weather?

[perfessor multigeek]

Irrigation doesn't affect the weather?
It certainly does on this planet, boyo.

Irrigated areas create different wind profiles, put water into the atmosphere (after all, that's how plants get water, it gets pulled up through the roots into the body of the plant by the capillary force of the water that's *already* evaporating off the leaves), and usually correlate with changes in species distribution and surface temperature.
Are these changes necessarily bad? A messy question. But they certainly take place.
Facts, ol' son. Start by getting facts.
Rustin

Re:screwing with weather?

[Selanit]

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 Aquifers are a resource in a delicate balance between the amount of water withdrawn and the amount of water recharged from streams and precipitation soaking into the ground.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. :-(

Re:So..

[atomicdragon]

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.

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.

Re:So..

[coupland]

Who wants odds on how long before weather is used as a weapon in war?

It's real, now. No need for speculation. The secretive European Union has been launching tornadoes and hurricanes and floods against the Americans for decades, unfortunately it's only resulted in more sturdy trailer-home designs...

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?

Seeding the rain

[nadaou]

In regards to the great flood of '52, I've got to repeat the old mantra.. "correlation does not predicate causality." (eg, "everyone who goes to the dentist dies")

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!)

Even if you can make clouds, it doesn't mean you make rain. At all.

Now if they could only figure out the upper reflection vs greenhouse effect balance, more clouds might help solve our global warming problem. Or make it much worse.

..if even just 5% of our research science budget went to blue sky research, it would be a good thing (and IMO would pay back ++). If only our 'philosopher king' were less of a king and more of a philosopher...

Re:Seeding the rain

[Ektanoor]

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.

Creating is not theft.

[twitter]

The zero sum game always amazes me. Why is it that people just can't see beyond it. The article says:

Professor Salter told the BBC: "We are trying to break through the layer of rather stagnant, humid air that's at the very, very bottom of the atmosphere, in contact with the sea surface, and lift large volumes of water through this and squirt them out from 10 metres up in the air as a very fine spray, with a very big surface area."

This is creation, not theft. They are taking moisture from the sea and putting it in the air. As all that water will end up back in the sea and the chances that this project will lower sea level are nil, no one has lost anything. Those who feel the rain will have gained much.

If ten meters is all you need, I would try chimneys to suck the moist air up. No moving parts, cheap to prefabricate, easy to errect.