China Vows to Stop the Rain

Since the Olympic stadium doesn't have a roof, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau has been given the task of making sure the games remain dry. According to Zhang Qian, head of weather manipulation (best title to have on a business card ever) at the bureau, they've had success with light rain but heavy rain remains tough to control. I see a hurricane cannon in some lucky country's future.

Comments

What in the hell?

[LordKaT]

Am I the only one seeing this retarded mess of a theme on idle.*?

Re:What in the hell?

[orclevegam]

Yeah, my first reaction was "WTF!?!?" so I went and checked some other articles to see if it was a new site design or something, but it looks like it's just this article.

Re:Rain's better than smog

[DataBroker]

I think I'd prefer to get wet or use an umbrella than breathe the horrible smog [guardian.co.uk] that blankets Beijing. In fact, the rain is often the only thing that reduces the smog and air pollution for a shirt while.

Wired actually had an article, Smog and Mirrors, about this exact same thing. They actually wrote the opposite of TFA:

And there's always the Hail Mary play: cloud seeding. Should air quality threaten to steal the show, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau promises to have its fleet of cloud-seeding aircraft warmed up on the runways, ready to bomb the sky with silver iodide and set off air-scrubbing showers over competition areas.

Re:Action/Reaction?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't actually *stop* the rain. It's most likely cloud seeding and similar... removing all the water from the clouds by making it fall early one way or another. Now, large scale weather manipulation is bad... but a few weeks in one city isn't going to hurt anything. Yea yea, butterfly effect and all... but also dynamic equilibrium.

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

No this is the idle section. It's a slashdot/4chan/youtube casserole! It's separate from the main site, but stories posted here are still sent to the firehose. This is the underbelly I guess you could say.

Nothing new for the Chinese

[henrypijames]

This thing isn't new at all: Eighteen years ago, at the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing, the organizers already managed to control the rain quite successfully. For instance, the opening ceremony which would have been disrupted by rain without intervention, ran smoothly in fairly sunny weather instead.

The technique is simple: Detect in advance the clouds which could cause rain in Beijing, then send airplanes to spread special dust particles to cause those clouds to rain immediately, thus "empty" them before they reach Beijing.

I'm quite convinced the Chinese aren't the only ones who's done this.

Re:Nothing new for the Chinese

[silicone_chemist]

Nope, it is done in the US to encourage rain to fall on the best areas. Like fields rather than cities. Texas is doing it and so are other states I'm sure. http://www.license.state.tx.us/weather/weatherfaq.htm

Re:Rain's better than smog

[TheGavster]

What sort of energy supply *isn't* affected by a blizzard? Anything that uses fuel relies on transportation links, and everything else relies on geography. Blizzards take down the thousand-mile power lines that get wind and solar to cities just as easily as they take down a train. I would say that shipping coal across a country is actually probably *better* than shipping oil halfway around the world.

Not that much rain to begin with

[specific_pacific]

Winters are dry and summers and not really wet, it's very much a dry city which is why the dust is such a problem. So maybe that'll make their jobs easier :)

They do *make* it rain by exploding these sulfer/salt bombs though. It covers car in this yellowish coating sometimes.

Before big visits it always rains for a couple of days before because they're doing this sort of thing. Then when the visitors arrive it's blue skies all round ;) Except for that time they forgot...