Weather manipulation

Interesting article in Sunday Times today about AbuDhabi manipulating the weather and creating downpours in desert. Secret project to start with apparently. Said to have caused over 50 rainstorms last year. Some of the storms included gales and lightning. They use giant ionisers to generate fields of ions in air.
Personally I think its asking for trouble, messing with Mother Nature. Wondered what some of you here thought about manipulating weather patterns.


Dont know if its ok to link or not, so I wont for now

Su Campu

It should be ok to link something, just don't copy and paste.

The UAE have been active in cloudseeding for some time, but their website hasn't been updated since 2006, so that might be why!

http://www.das.ae/cld/cloud.htm

isle of man

russia been using it for years to keep the sky clear for speical days.

something like 6000 hour you can have a clear sky wedding in ruissa.

forgot the link.

think china used it last year as well

BEASTERLY

I believe china tried a long range version where they forced it to rain during the dry season, so it wouldn't rain in the 2008 wet season(during the Olympics) unfortunately i think misunderstood how the seasons worked.

Anyway it still lashed rain during the Olympics so that was a failure but on a day to day thing it is certainly possible. I watched a documentary recently claiming that cloud seeding was responsible for a thunderstorm that caused a lot of destruction in England.

Matt Simis

Jake1 wrote: »

Personally I think its asking for trouble, messing with Mother Nature. Wondered what some of you here thought about manipulating weather patterns.

Our entire existence from the usage of fire and the taming of animals has consisted entirely of manipulating our environment. Consider what electricity, the internal combustion engine, WiFi, Radio Waves, Microwaves etc would seem like if described to someone from 150-500years ago.

Without knowing details of this project, most of which are likely far above most peoples comprehension (including mine I assume) you cannot really reduce the entire idea to simply "asking for trouble".

M.T. Cranium

Just don't let this technology fall into the hands of the Boards weather forum crew, because then it will be asking for trouble. :cool:

delw

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

Just don't let this technology fall into the hands of the Boards weather forum crew, because then it will be asking for trouble. :cool:

god could you imagine,we'd have snow one day,then an atlantic storm/front the next,then nice clear bright sunny day..
actualy now that i think about it we have that,ok who's already got the technology in ireland,com'on own up

Harps

There was an article posted on here a while ago about Moscow using cloud seeding so heavy snow would fall outside the city and not effect the city itself. Obviously then theres the problem that the area the snow does fall will be badly effected but on the whole it doesnt seem like a bad idea for situations like that

steveLFC24

Harps wrote: »

There was an article posted on here a while ago about Moscow using cloud seeding so heavy snow would fall outside the city and not effect the city itself. Obviously then theres the problem that the area the snow does fall will be badly effected but on the whole it doesnt seem like a bad idea for situations like that

I doubt the people living outside the city were happy about that :pac:

thetonynator

Leahyl would have cork city covered in a foot of snow while it would be 20 degrees and sunny in west cork with graces7 . . .:P

could it be used to startle birds from Sky , I wonder

If it can do good, it can also do bad.

M.T. Cranium

To put this in context, weather modification including rain and snow suppression works this way -- you can create local precip from less active towering cumulus but studies have shown no significant effects outside the target area, so while this is not quite "proof" of an absence of risk to the larger system's overall integrity, there is not a lot of concern about activities where local showers are created. As to the suppression of rain or snow, there again studies have shown that while there may be limited success in the primary objective, there is no significant harmful effect elsewhere. In the Moscow example, the snow suppression efforts would effectively reduce snowfall from a widespread snowfall storm system, but outside the area being modified, there would be no reduction -- it's not the same as saying the snow for Moscow was diverted elsewhere.

Where people might have more legitimate concern would be if such practices became very common and widespread, then clearly we get into a lot of unknowns about transfers of energy, heat and moisture on a regional or hemispheric scale, and this is where unintended consequences (probably unpredictable) might develop. Personally, I don't think there has been enough of this kind of modification going on yet to warrant such concern. I am also somewhat dubious of the real potential in some cases.

Large-scale weather modification (like the sort of Doctor Evil scenarios of diverting hurricanes or severe storm systems, not necessarily for good purposes) is almost certainly a minimum of 50 and probably more like 100-200 years into the future, and may never become feasible. From what my research indicates, the energy required to create weather systems from external sources (such as orbiting satellite networks) would have a scale far beyond anything the current technology could rig up even in an absolute emergency, let alone with market value considerations. Also there is the problem that theory is both underdeveloped and out of the mainstream, even if we took the consensus or total theoretical ponderings of half a dozen different people looking into the subject, we are nowhere near ready to transfer this theory into technology. However, when you look at the pace of modern science in general, you can't really rule out weather modification capability coming into the picture at some future point. If I had to guess when this might first begin to happen (on a large scale) I would say 2150 give or take 50 years, and I would think it to be 90% likely before 2400, assuming no collapse of advanced societies in the meantime. I have the feeling that weather modification would advance in sync with space travel, partly because some of the technology considerations might be integrated.