China Is Splashing $168 Million To Make It Rain (fortune.com)

China, the world's second largest economy, is pouring 1.5 billion yuan ($168 million) into a program aimed at making it rain in its usually arid northwestern region. From a report: No stranger to using technologies like cloud seeding to influence and even control weather patterns, China's top economic planners recently gave the go ahead for what will be one of the country's largest weather-modification projects, reports the South China Morning Post. According to the Post, a feasibility study by the country's meteorological agency concluded that the three-year program could see a rise in precipitation over an area of 960,000 sq km, or as much as 10% of the country's landmass. The multi-million dollar budget allocated by the National Development and Reform Commission will reportedly cover the cost for four new aircraft and updates to eight existing planes, nearly 900 rocket launch systems and over 1,800 digital control devices.

Comments

It's the Gobi Desert

[Anonymous Coward]

"Usually arid northwestern region" indeed. They'd have better luck doing what Africa is doing to combat the spread of the Sahara -- e.g. restoring grasslands.

It's Gobi desert...

[denzacar]

A rain shadow desert.
Any "countries where that rain would otherwise have landed" already got most of the moisture out of the air, which is why that place is a desert.

Cloud seeding is part of Chinese plan to build a Green Great Wall to stop the spread of the desert and the sandstorms.
Which seems to be doing something, at least in the sense that it is apparently lowering the water table in the areas where trees are planted.

Or that is at least what the opposition to the forestation program claims, suggesting instead simply fencing off the area and "nurturing the land by the land itself".
How would that create trees in areas which were "treeless in the last several thousand years", or how would temporary fencing off prevent sandstorms (even should grassland work that way) once the fences are removed and the grasslands are once again used for cattle grazing... the article doesn't mention that.
Then again, water levels have been dropping long before forestation project started. And trees are supposed to keep the water in the ground...

On the other hand, Epoch Times is more than a little a Falun Gong paper.
I.e. Whatever Chinese government does is wrong. While whatever Falun Gong does might get them arrested and "reeducated" by the government. Or harvested.

In any case, weather modification is being done in order to provide water for the Green Wall in the area which got desertified as the water from Shiyang River was used for irrigation upstream decades ago.