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."

Comments

Re:In other news...

[steve_l]

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...

Re:sound fishy to me

[LennyDotCom]

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.