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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."
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
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.
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 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...
A better explanation of the process can be read here.
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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
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).