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Preempting Hailstone Formation To Protect Cars
Makarand writes "Nissan has become the first automaker in the United States to start using
a device that suppresses hail formation to protect its fleet of new vehicles
from hailstorm damage. The device is a cannon capable of shooting sonic waves upto
50,000 feet in the air to keep hailstones from forming. The
device comes with its own weather radar and activates when it detects
conditions favorable for hail formation. The device can provide
hailstorm protection in an area with one-mile radius by firing
sonic waves every five seconds."
Is that 120 db pulse every 5 seconds really going to do anything to a giant thundercloud, which for one probably buffers the sound. Also, is 120 db really that loud compared to the localized sound from a single lightning strike?
Sounds to me like these guys got taken. It's pretty hard to prove that you prevented hail, just as it is hard to prove that you created rain.
I'd personally like to thank Nissan for coming up with yet another way to fck up the natural processes on this planet. Hate to infringe upon Nissan's bottom line but hail, like all weather, happens for a reason.
Maybe next Cadillac will come out with a devise that will make sure within a one mile radius the sky is always clear at night, so people can enjoy their moonroofs.
Precip. patterns? Things that need water to live? Bah!
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Any idea what the environmental impact is from these things?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Apparently you don't want to live nearby (see the bottom of the story).
This sounds like it's worse than living next to an airport.
right. because you know more about the field from your cursory search than the people who researched it and the people who spent millions of dollars to install it.
skepticism is fine, you just have to use more proof than "this sounds like a bunch of baloney". cations are real you know.
In the linked site, they "include a waranty, providing indemnity for losses and damages to assets in case that the Ollivier Hail Suppression System(R) does not function properly".
In other words, you're replacing your insurance policies with their warranty. Depending on the reliability of their financial resources & how much these sound cannons cost, this could actually save money for Nissan even if it doesn't work (as I assume).
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Historically, planes used dry ice and flares to seed clouds and therefore prevent hail. This approach seems too loud for people around these machines. Aren't huge shockwaves like this thing produces the reason why jets are forbidden to fly over most land at supersonic speeds? Why is this ok?
Don't get me wrong. We got one of those car parks in the dock area here and it is huge but it wouldn't need to be a complex roof and its success would be 100%. Also stops sunlight and seagull shit and acid rain.
So nice story, didn't know this was even possible but Nissan probably got had. Will be intresting to hear what their neighbours will have to say about it. Noise polution in a 5 mile area? Never be allowed over here. Here people complain they can hear the trains in the house they bought that is next the rail track.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't mean to be a spoilsport, but ... why don't they just build a roof?
*looks puzzled*
And would need to cover 140 acres, which is the size of the parking lot...
I agree completely. Reading about this system made me marvel at the salesmanship involved. You'd think anyone past high school would recognize such obvious pseudoscience, but I guess the saying about fools being born every minute is a great truism. People don't realize how rare hail damage is, statistically, and so they can be led to believe that systems like this work, when it's just very likely that hail hasn't fallen on that 100-acre plot of land in the last three years because, well, hail wasn't going to fall there in the first place.
Unless Nissan got a better deal, even the company's guarantee is worthless, viz.:
So, even if hundreds of acres of cars are hail-damaged while the system is in use (after the 20-minute warmup period), the company is only liable for the cost of the "hail suppression system", minus $5000! However, you have to pay, either directly or via a service contract, for an annual inspection to keep the 3-year warrranty in force--price undisclosed.
The only way this makes any economic sense for Nissan is if they got the system for free, so that the shyster company can use them as a showcase customer, for the publicity value. Even then, you'd think the public embarassment at being associated with such a scam would be intolerable.
The whole thing reminds me of the story about the guy jumping up and down in the middle of the street, blowing a whistle. Someone walks up and says,
"Why are you blowing the whistle?"
"To scare the elephants away."
"Elephants? There are no elephants around here!"
"See? It's working!"
Wouldn't a fucking roof be cheaper -- and more intelligent? They need to screw up local weather patterns as well? Have they done environmental studies for collateral effects?
Jesus.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
How big would a multistory with 140 acres of parking room be? I just can't escape the feeling that they'd be able to protect the cars far more effectively, be able to implement better security and increase the amount of green space around the factory by ripping up 140 acres of tarmac, building a roofed multistory and landscaping the remaining ground.
Yeah, that web site looks pretty sketchy to me, not that I'm an expert. The photo you mentioned has a white area in the foreground---could be snow, could be hail---and a HUGE non-white area in the background. That is NOT a picture of a "small hail-free patch", surrounded by an area with hail. There is no hail or snow visible on the far side of the hail-free area. It does not seem possible from the picture on their website to verify that the white stuff is actually hail; it could be snow. The whole thing could be Photoshop.
Other pages on the site have:
* inconsistent information (every 5.5 seconds; every 6 seconds; every 5 seconds; the noise level is listed at various levels, too...)
* dubious statements like "supersonic explosions do not affect animals"
* incorrect spelling and punctuation
* overuse of jargon and jargon-y words (such as "ascending thermionic explosions"). Looking at this web site, I got the feeling that they did not want me to understand how it works, they just want me to be impressed.
* Worst of all: statistics! Why do they start the noise level measurements 50m away? Are you not supposed to go closer than 50m while it's operating? What if you install this on the roof of your car?
Of course, they don't have to explain their patented super-invention to me. But if they are going to deliberately withhold information, they could have been less patronizing about it! Overall, the site seems to have a very low level of professionalism. To whatever degree this reflects on the device itself, it reflects poorly.
zach
The fighter would probably appear to be a deep cave opening to a bat, rather than give the impression that the hangar is completely empty. They probably all flew into it at top speed expecting to find a great place to live.
The technology is solid and has been proven. The cost ratio is better to go with a sound generator.
Now, all we need is something to disrupt tornadoes...
This is not a very good solution. It only protects cars in the devices' vicinity. But once you buy the car what's to protect it then? A real solution would be one that protected the car at all times. More resilient glass and body panels. And paint that can withstand hail strikes. I guess that car makers don't really care what happens once you've bought the car.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
Did you even read the article? This is the ninth one installed in the United States. There are 400 world wide, ... its primary use is to protect crops...
And you think it doesn't work? How'd they sell 400 of the things? When's the last time you saw an apple with hail damage? Did you think it had just stopped hailing?
As for changing nature, sweet jeebus, we're humans we change nature to suit us all the time, or did you think crops just naturally formed in large patches of ground? You're surfing the net, if you have a CRT monitor you have electrons shooting out into your face right now. Did you think that someone just found it on the beach?
The basic principle is that nature is not as fragile as it's portrayed. I don't think shooting a couple of shock waves into the air is going to cause any irreparable damage, and if we didn't screw with nature occasionally we would still be sitting in caves, eating berries and grubs.
Well...it may be counterintuitive, but it probably isn't safe to write it off without a test. Perhaps the shock waves generated are tuned somehow to be particularly effective at disrupting hail.
My area of expertise is optical phenomena, not sound, so I'll take an example from my field. A thirty watt incandescent lamp is pretty weak--you can read by it, but it's pretty dim. Staring at a thirty watt argon laser will rapidly blind you, while the beam from a thirty watt carbon dioxide laser will easily ignite wood.
I agree with the parent poster that any sound energy generated by this device will be absolutely infinitesimal compared to the total energy available in even a moderate thunderstorm. Nevertheless, I think we would need to know about the possible coherence of the sound and its frequency spectrum before we can say if it might or might not be effective. Also of note, the goal is not the complete disruption of the thunderstorm. All Nissan seeks to do is reduce the size of the hailstones produced to the point where they won't damage their cars. It may be that it is (relatively) easy to disrupt the process of large hailstone formation. Rain, snow, sleet, or millimeter-size hailstones won't hurt their inventory.
The question of hailstones carried significant distances to the site is an interesting one. Perhaps the device causes the storm to drop the stones beyond the perimeter of the parking lot...or perhaps Nissan is following a strategy of reducing their risk. They acknowledge there will still be hail damage; they're just hoping for less.
Presumably, Nissan management is not populated entirely by idiots who get off on public humiliation--wouldn't you expect there to have been some testing of this device before installation?
~Idarubicin
Disproving good hard science takes a bit longer. Not just because of the effort involved, but because of the inertia of supposedly rational scientific thinkers -- just ask Barry Marshall:
If this has been in use since the 1980s, and if it has prevented the formation of hail as it claims, then the evidence should be available for people to see. And if that evidence shows that it does, in fact, prevent hail formation, then there's obviously something working.
Given the number of years this has been in service in New Zealand and the like, it should be possible to find evidence of it working or not working -- through the absence or presence of hail in the general region where the device is used, along with the absence or presence of hail in the local area immediately near where the device is (with some accounting for the effect of wind blowing hail one way or the other).
Not all things that work in ways that science doesn't understand are pseudoscience, and not all commonly-accepted scientific principles are not. The "hard" part of hard science is where we constantly re-evaluate our own view of how things work.
In short, give this a chance. I can understand people being fooled in the short run, but since people have used things like this since the 80's, they must keep using 'em for some reason. Maybe they don't work and the folks just want to get their money's worth! But until you go to the source of the data and examine it critically, how can you know, regardless of how good your understanding of current science is?