Airplanes Unexpectedly Modify Weather

reillymj writes "Commercial airliners have a strange ability to create rain and snow when they fly through certain clouds. Scientists have known for some time that planes can make outlandish 'hole-punch' and 'canal' features in clouds. A new study has found that these odd formations are in fact evidence that planes are seeding clouds and changing local weather patterns as they fly through. In one case, researchers noted that a plane triggered several inches of snowfall directly beneath its flight path."

Comments

What wasn't mentioned

[mlawrence]

Was this plane belonged to the Mexican Cocaine Cartels, who thought they were being trailed.

Chemtrails?

[courteaudotbiz]

How long before a conspirationnist comes up with a chemtrail comment?

Re:Chemtrails?

[clarkkent09]

Never heard of chemtrails before but I did notice that my cat is shedding more fur in the summer than in the winter, and there are also more flights from the local airport in the summer. If they can cause cats to shed, imagine what they are doing to your brain! Thanks for opening my eyes.

More of a duh, really.

[vandoravp]

They are just giant butterflies, after all.

I don't see

[Anonymous Coward]

what's the problem {?|.}

Re:Tenerife

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean when it was closed because of a volcanic ash cloud? I'm sure we can attribute any and all weather changes entirely to the lack of airplanes...

the short D20 version of this (its a dice roll)

[RobertLTux]

to create a rain/snow storm in a given area certain things have to happen

lets say you need to roll 60 on a d100 to get rain and roll a 4 (on a d6) to get snow IF YOU ROLL RAIN

just dartboarding a few factors you need to have
greater than X% humidity (add 7 to your roll for every 10% above X)
a cold front near by to generate the clouds (and provide for some winds) (add 2 for every 1.5 degree difference)
enough seeds in the clouds to tilt things past the equalibrium
a low enough temp that the water doesn't boil off (penalty of 1 on the d6 roll for every 20 degrees above 0C)

now having a bunch of planes i would bet could 1 add to the "muck" in the air 2 twist the temps a bit 3 do a whole lot more than a butterfly in generating wind

Re:Not surprising

[zippthorne]

    A few drinks later, it doesn't really matter though, I'll take a nice nap until I hear the landing gear go down. :)

Based on what I've seen of pilots, they're thinking the same thing....

Re:I don't understand the Karma System

[Anachragnome]

The Slashdot moderation systems is a system of layers.

Users are randomly assigned "moderation points" that can be spent moderating a post upwards "+1", or down with "-1" and include a "tag".

Once spent, the points are painted onto ping pong balls--"+" balls and "-" balls. These are then thrown together in a large hopper and fed down a tube to the squirrel cage. In this cage, dozens of specially trained squirrels sort the ping pong balls according to size and shape and drop them down appropriate tubes to be further sorted by the next stage of squirrels. Once fully sorted, each ping pong ball is individually routed through a pipe that determines the tag that will be applied. The ping pong balls are then routed back to the beginning of the system. The ping pong balls are siphoned off from various points throughout the system at the same rate that posts are made. Each ping pong ball is then assigned to a random post, and there ya have it--Slashdot moderation.

I hope that helps.

Poor rebuttal

[YuppieScum]

I feel that any rebuttal that begins

To quote wikipedia:

is inherently invalid.