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China Claims Score In Weather Manipulation

Posted by timothy on from the home-field-advantage dept.

hackingbear writes "Despite prior skepticism over effectiveness, China claims successful application of weather intervention to ensure a stunning Olympic opening ceremony, according to a report by the official Xinhua News Agency: 'We fired a total of 1,104 rain dispersal rockets from 21 sites in the city between 4 p.m. and 11:39 p.m. on Friday, which successfully intercepted a stretch of rain belt from moving towards the stadium,' said Guo Hu, head of the Beijing Municipal Meteorological Bureau (BMB). While there wasn't a single drop of rain over the National Stadium — also known as the Bird's Nest — during the opening ceremony from 8:00pm-12:00am on August 8, the weather services said that Baoding City of Hebei Province, to the southwest of Beijing, received the biggest rainfall of 100 millimeters Friday night, and Beijing's Fangshan District recorded a rainfall of 25 millimeters."

2 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. The most controlled Olympics ever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not only is the weather being controlled but so are the people. For the first time ever the Olympic road cycling course was deserted. The silence freaked out quite a few of the riders, who are used to Tour de France conditions, where the spectators go berserk.

  2. Re:Absence of evidence is not evidence of Absence by jamesh · · Score: 5, Informative

    The tests of various rain-making programs have been more or less a wash. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't

    We've been doing cloud seeding since the 60's or so here in Australia. It works under a fairly specific set of circumstances. You need clouds that are 'bursting at the seams' and are going to drop their rain at some point in the very near future. Given such clouds, you drop silver iodide into them and you'll increase the chance of the rain event happening now rather than a bit later, and probably increase the volume of rain too.

    You'll never get rain out of air that just doesn't have enough moisture in it to begin with though.

    And you can't stop it raining somewhere, except by coaxing the clouds into making their rain somewhere else first, which is what I think China did (or what I think China think they did :)