Control the Rain - Cloud Seeding

Zzzt writes "The Times Online reports that Russian president Putin will assure plesant weather at the Russian St. Petersburg 300th anniversary festival by seeding clouds. They plan to shoot dry ice into the clouds to get the moisture to condense prematurely. 'Vladimir Stepanenko, head physicist of St Petersburg's Geophysics Observatory, said: 'Our aim is to empty all clouds of rain before they hit the city borders.'' There is also brief mention of other fun things Russians do with weather control."

Comments

Making it rain in Russia

[Strange Ranger]

is a hell of lot more than a butterfly flapping its wings in China.

It occurs to me that we could use more research and that maybe we ought to deal with weather modification on an international level (global weather maps, climate history, meteorological cooperation) rather than on a more local one?

Not crying 'Wolf' here but it wouldn't be a bad idea.

Re:Weather Control

[metamathica]

Things like floods, snow storms and hurricanes are highly unlikely to be altered. In the places where they happen, they are elements of the climate, not the weather.

The difference is an important one, and lost on most people. Weather varies from hour to hour, and is fundamentally impossible to predict precisely . Climate is large-scale observations, like how hot the summer will be (in general) and how cold the winter. Predictions of climate are much simpler, and not limited by chaotic interrelations.

Seeding the clouds is not new. The ski mountain where I grew up has been doing it for years to get early snow. It's easy to make a little rain or move it a little upwind; it's probably near impossible to make controllable climatic changes.

We have already made significant climatic changes by emitting greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. Because climate is such a large-scale phenomenon, those are the sorts of changes that will change it. Changing the climate is a very bad thing, and our changes already threaten to make life on earth considerably less pleasant if we're not careful.

People who don't understand this distinction often wonder how we could predict global warming when we can't predict the weather. The average temperature during a month is a basically a thermodynamic function of incoming solar radiation, thermal reradiation and heat shielding. The chaotic local effects mostly cancel out on larger scales.