Swiss Researchers Try to Make it Rain With Lasers

formaggio writes "Last year a team of researchers at Switzerland's University of Geneva had come up with an interesting way of making it rain– by shooting lasers high up into the sky. At the time it seemed like science fiction, but now they are one step closer after the team successfully finished tests around Lake Geneva. From the article: 'Records from 133 hours of firings revealed that intense pulses of laser light created nitric acid particles in the air that behaved like atmospheric glue, binding water molecules together into droplets and preventing them from re-evaporating. Within seconds, these grew into stable drops a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter: too small to fall as rain, but large enough to encourage the scientists to press on with the work.'"

Comments

Make it rain...

[Anonymous Coward]

While they weren't able to make rain fall they did make 34 pigeons, 12 sparrows, 334 bees and 1 hanglider fall from the sky...

Re:Make it rain...

[Joce640k]

...and a whole lot of nitric acid.

Flood the Sahara

[Anonymous Coward]

If only there were a way to divert all the clouds from the places that get too much rainfall and flooding, and have them all over the Sahara, as well as the Arabian peninsula. Would make that entire continent more agriculture rich, and solve food distribution issues in the region. While at the same time, giving the heavily rained on regions some respite!

Re:Flood the Sahara

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But we'll need droids who can speak their binary language...

Re:Flood the Sahara

[Xest]

Yes, then that way the dust that blows across the Atlantic from the Sahara to fertilize the Amazon can stop, and whilst Africa becomes a luscious new area of growth the whole of the Amazon can just die off.

Really, fucking around with things that can have such a massive, potentially unknown effect elsewhere isn't a smart idea at all because you can just end up making things worse.

Other parts of the world depend on the Sahara being like the Sahara is, so if you change the Sahara, you change those other parts of the world. In boosting food supplies in Africa you damage the food supplies in say South America, and create a problem there instead.

Re:Flood the Sahara

[smpoole7]

> Other parts of the world depend on the Sahara ...

Yep. I've got hurricanes on the mind lately, so here's just one example that might not immediately occur to more normal people (I'm definitely abnormal): sometimes, you'll have a storm brewing in the Atlantic, but intensity will be inhibited by dry Saharan air mixing into the core. If you remove that dry air, we might have stronger hurricanes.

Of course, then someone will decide to blow lasers or set off nukes in the storm to compensate. What could POSSIBLY go wrong then? :)

Re:Flood the Sahara

[Xest]

It depends what you mean by "just fine".

Certainly it wasn't the same ecosystem it is now, and certainly removing fertilization from the sahara would decrease south american biomass and reduce biodiversity.

If you mean it'd still have some green stuff there then yes, you're probably right, but how much, and how diverse would be the fundamental problem. Would biomass increase in Africa occur quickly enough to deal with the resultant decrease in South America, and hence the potential imbalances in CO2 capture, storage, and release? That's anyones guess. It's too complex a system to play around with without risking massively dangerous side effects far more damaging than the current situation of overpopulation relative to the resources to support the population in Africa.

Re:what could go wrong?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

As long as you aren't doing it in any flight paths, you are probably not going to cause any immediate damage...

The real giggles, with the eventual success of any of these cloud-seeding projects, will be political(probably with a side of Aral-sea style ecological fuck-uppery in places where people don't care very much):

As with rivers that flow across political boundaries(a source of endless contention over water rights, complaints by team downstream that team upstream is taking too much water out and/or dumping too much shit in, etc.), air currents carrying enough water vapor to be even theoretically 'seed-able' are a finite resource. Rain that falls in one location won't be available to fall in another one. Historically, there hasn't been all that much fighting(either the legal flavor, or the literal flavor) about it, because rainfall was pretty much just a function of geography, climate, and luck.

Should it become possible to 'pump' a cloud with some comparatively inexpensive apparatus(whether it be this laser widget or some other thing), reliable air currents flowing from regions of evaporation will become a new flavor of 'river', suddenly subject to rivalrous use, and the rivalries that stem from it. Happy times!

Now the sharks will flood the earth...

[moenoel]

... with their head mounted lasers. The horror.

That's good

[JockTroll]

Doctor Frankenstein was from Geneva. Nothing like his descendants firing lasers into thunderclouds. Now witness the firepower of this FULLY ARMED and OPERATIONAL battlestation!

Not much luck with the rain

[will_die]

but I hear they have made a nice CH engraved in the moon.

Re:New Age

[chromas]

The age of lasers seeding torrents in the Cloud.

Re:New Age

[AHuxley]

Its called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program
The in 1980's origins http://www.eastlundscience.com/HAARP.html
by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Eastlund
The DoD presentations http://www.eastlundscience.com/HAARPROOTS.html
The early ideas http://www.eastlundscience.com/HAARPROADMAP.html
The U. S. Patent 4,712,155 http://www.eastlundscience.com/HAARPWEATHER.html

Re:cosmic rays from the sun

[Sockatume]

Wrong.

Your version of the story is not getting much press because it's not true.

Re:Is this safe?

[Sockatume]

Compounds like nitric acid act as nucleation sites for rain already. It'd be no more acidic than natural precipitation.

Re:cosmic rays from the sun

[Hatta]

No, his version of the story is not getting much press because there's no money in it. Truth and falsehood make no difference to the press.

Re:Is this safe?

[Sockatume]

Right, you still have to deal with dicking with the nitrogen cycle, but at least the pH of the rain will be normal.

Re:what could go wrong?

[TapeCutter]

I don't understand how cloud seeding can possibly be effective. It seems hard to believe that the air above dry places becomes supersaturated because it doesn't have enough dust in the air to act as condensation nuclei. Besides, a cloud is already a bunch of droplets that have formed around condensation nuclei. These droplets then sink to an altitude below the dew point and then simply evaporate again (forming the base of the cloud). So how can cloud seeding overcome the altitude of the dew point?

Yes, I realise that vertical winds and the size of ice crystals complicates things but I still can't see artificial cloud seeding as having a significant effect on rainfall.