Slashdot Mirror
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."
In New Zealand, horticulturalists have used this technology for at least 5 or 10 years now. In the region I live in, hail storms often ruin the large apple crops which were once our main industry.
Some horticulturalists have even been known to fly helicopters above their crops over night to stop frost from forming.
Exactly, can you change the weather just because you own the land under it? I don't think there are any laws dealing with these things, but then IANAL.
Martin
I don't think it has to do anything to the thundercloud. If I remember right, hailstones form as the water falls from the could, not inside the cloud itself.
I'm assuming that the sonic pulse is supposed to somehow agitate the falling water to keep it from forming large ice crystals so they melt once they get to the lower (and warmer) atmosphere. Or something like that. I'm too lazy to read too deeply into the company's website.
Either way, they claim a 100% success rate, and if Nissan is willing to buy them I imagine that they have evidence to back it up. It doesn't seem that it would be impossible to prove the product works - most hailstorms are larger than the 0.3 mile radius effective range they claim. If you can repeatedly show hailstorms with a small hail-free patch surrounding the device, I'd say there's significant evidence that this isn't just a bunch of baloney.
You obviously aren't a farmer. And as for proving it works my crops are standing and the ones on the farm next door are torn to shreads.
Um, most likely nothing. Many things in nature create more and louder noises... some in the sky... um... lightning? er, thunder... You know. Not to mention the noise polution humans already create. Cars, planes, American Idol. One little cannon making noise during thunderstorms which are already loud really shouldn't affect anything.
Any idea what the environmental impact is from these things?
It might have effects on airborn creatures that are similar to the effects on water dwellers that Navy sonar appears to be having, or it might not.
Sadly, no one has any idea what the effects will be on animal and insect populations, if any. If in fact serious damage is being done, there will be enough people willing to work to deny that there are any environmental problems, as has happened with virtually all other approaches to economic problems that wound up having serious environmental consequences.
It's interesting... I'm in Canada, and my Dad was born/raised on a farm, and yet I'd never even heard of the concept, never mind the actual implementation of this.
./ in a while.
I've actually found it to be one of the more interesting articles on
Can you hear the things from where you are? Do they have much of an impact/annoyance-factor for people living in the surrounding areas?
$0.02 (CDN)
Then how come those US submarines are capable of beaching and killing a few hundred wales everytime they try out their new sonar system?
Seriously. This thing makes noises in a way yet unprecedented. It may very well interfere with bird flight routes or many other things. Just sucking your thumb is no way to dismiss a possible enironmental impact.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
This reminds me of the German antipersonnel sonic cannon developed during WWII.
Apparently, this one required a targetted infantryman to remain in place for more than half a minute, but the idea is probably similar.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Water is a much better medium than air for propagating sound. That's why the whales get driven mad by certain sonar systems. The effects of these hail-preventers would be localised.
I'd be interested to know what the effects on local birds are, although I'd imagine they don't hang around underneath a cloud that's about to lash down golf-ball sized hail...
I say we take-off and slashdot the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure
This is funny.
In the book 'the skunk works', one of the pilots in the stealth fighters in the first Bush gulf war describes how before the war began they used to go to their hangars in the morning and find the planes surrounded by dead bats.
There were a lot of bats in the area, and the design of the fighters meant they not only didnt reflect radar, they didnt reflect sound. So these bats would be swooping around what sounded like an empty hangar, when suddenly they'd run into an invisible force field that would injure or kill them...
Hmmmm. Hang on - lightning occurs when there is a great potential difference between the cloud and the earth, right? So as the cloud is getting ready to shoot negatively-charged particles downwards could you shoot positively-charged ions upwards?
To answer my own question, I think there'd be a great risk of triggering a lightning strike by doing this, so you're probably right :)
I say we take-off and slashdot the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure
- in water, not air.
- at a much higher output level, over 200dB IIRC -- not 120dB which is about the noise which your local discotheque will happily torture you with.
- works infrasonic
In other words: How many whales have been killed so far by the sound of starting/landing airplanes? Or beach discotheques?Same goes for the pidgeon question, btw. They'll have a harder time finding themselves getting sucked into jet engines rather than feeling the effect of some distant 120dB sound.
Actually, almost every household equipment in Japan is sold with the tag "minus ion". [mai-nas ee-on] I had never heard of minus ions doing anything interesting as regards your house, until I got here. Seems that they are supposed to be good for your health (as everyone except me obviously knows).
You may have been prescient: The new Lexus LS-430 has golf ball dimples on the underside.
A better explanation of the process can be read here.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
I remember when I was taking my intro to weather classes, we discussed such a device. The Russians used to try something similar in an attempt to break up thunderstorms. The idea was basically the same, just shoot something up into the cloud and disturb its ability to hail. Problems with this device fell into three major categories:
1) Didn't work at all.
2) When it did work, all it did was move the storm out of range of the device. Once out of range, the cloud would dump twice as much on the unprotected area. This gets really political when farmer John is flooding farmer Bill's field two miles down the road.
3) Lots of dead wildlife (birds).
Is that 120 db pulse every 5 seconds really going to do anything to a giant thundercloud
When I spent my summers as a kid in italy on the farm when ever it looked like hail I would hear a booming sound like cannons. My mother told me it was the cannons that they fired into the clouds to stop the hail from knocking the grapes off the vines.
http://Lenny.com
This is not really that new. There is an apple orchard near my grandparents farm that has a sound cannon to prevent hail damage to the apples. I've seen it operate a couple of times. You can actually watch the sound waves ripple through the rain/hail in the sky. We use to always speculate whether or not it really works...apparently he thinks it does
The only real difference here is the application and the radar (the farmer would manually turn it on)
Farmers carry insurance for that protection. Seems like a better idea to me, we grow far more crops than we need, so let insurance cover the small amount that are destroyed, and leave the weather alone.
Remember when car were going to save the cities from pollution? Of course not, because that was about 100 years ago, but back about 1900 cars were welcomed in many cities because they didn't leave droppings all over the streets. Of course today we know about the droppings they leave all over the air... I don't know which is worse. (Yes I know that not everyone welcomed cars, but many did)
Even if this could work ( which I seriously doubt ), is there any thought given to the ramifications of messing with natural processes?
while *we* may have no use for them, they are part of nature, and do play a part in what goes on.
Once we start screwing with the 'way of things', we are just asking for troubles we cant even foresee as of yet.
And not I'm not a 'tree hugger', I just worry about the caviler attitude, ' well if we don't like it, today, we will just change nature to suit us'....
Just look at the great dustbowl in the Midwest US if you don't think our seemingly unimportant actions can have drastic effects decades later...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Last year, Nissan incurred hail damage to tens of thousands of new vehicles waiting for transport outside of their plant in (I think) Tennessee. The entire inventory was auctioned off to dealers are rock bottom prices (even for wholesale). I would expect that the dealers fixed up the hail damage and subsequently sold the cars. However, it meant a loss of millions of dollars of revenue to Nissan USA.
This device is a small and worthwhile investment, even if there is only one hailstorm in the next decade.
Actually, it was the U.S. Navy that first noticed that a negative charge on the air has positive effects on crew health and morale. This was observed in submerged nuclear subs where external environment effects are well controlled due to being submerged for long periods.
It is thought that the morale destroying effects of 'the doldrums' reported historically are in part caused by the generally positive charge on the air. That's much harder to prove sine it could also be the general lack of wind (and thus progress on the voyage).
I used to be a sonar operator.
This effect is known as cavitation - it occurs because of a drop in pressure causing sea water to boil at sea temperature in the low pressure parts of the sound wave. It also occurs in front of ship's propellers, and is one way for submarines to detect surface vessels ("popping" sounds). Our frigate's propellers started cavitating at about 12 knots' speed.
Submarines have propellers especially designed to avoid this, as their operation is based on stealth.
The sound pressure from an active sonar dome can exceed 200 db due to the high density of water, and can kill divers in the vicinity of the vessel. A fellow operator inadvertently turned on the sonar while in harbour, killed some fish (luckily no divers were in the water at the time), and was relocated instantly.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Eric
[The subject line is a reference to the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, in which the U.S. government publicly announces the existence of the said machine, and all the wonderful benefits it will have, when in fact it is a weapon which can only cause destruction within the U.S.]
(No offense to any 5 year olds that may be reading.)
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium