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Stopping the Rain
 “Rain, Rain Go Away, Come Again Another Day” is a universal rhyme sung by our children year after year everywhere in the world.
Rain is part of our life; sometimes it comes in a big way and cause enormous damage to human activities an at times it does not come and create drought.
Rain brings in water for our livelihood.
When it comes?
How much we get?
Where do we get it?
These are some of the questions asked by everyone but seriously researched on by weatherman.
Forecasting weather is a big science handled by Meteorologists all over the world.
Recently, the news from China is amazing to all of us.
The Beijing Meteorological Bureau wants to stop the rain at the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games on 8 August 2008; since the 91,000-seated main stadium, nicknamed ‘bird’s nest’ has no roof.
So Chinese meteorologists will be using weather-modification technologies.
It was the discovery of Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir to seed clouds with carbon dioxide created nuclei around which water could freeze.
Later Bernard Vonnegut discovered that silver iodide could also be used.
In fact, this technology is widely adopted across the Globe.
In drought prone parts of the world, countries practice some form of cloud seeding to increase rainfall up to about 10%.
Countries, to produce rain every year to quench the thirst of the cracking soil and the living organisms including the human beings, spend millions of dollars.
The science behind seeding is quite interesting. In super cooled clouds, which usually reside at high altitudes, water freezes around particles that serve as nuclei.
The ice crystals when get too heavy, they fall from the sky and melt, turning into rain or snow.
The whole process is called glaciogenic seeding and silver iodide is the widely used glaciogenic chemical.
The warmer clouds at lower altitudes are targeted through hygroscopic seeding. In this process, compounds like sodium; lithium and potassium salts are used to make larger droplets from small droplets that can fall.
How to prevent rain during the Olympics 2008 at Beijing?
It is the real concern for the BMB.
It is planned to get the clouds to rain out before reaching Beijing or to prevent small clouds from getting bigger by dissipating them with salt.
If it does not work, they will over-seed the clouds hoping to reduce the size of each water droplet or ice crystal, which is then more likely to be dissipated before reaching the ground.
Cannons, rocket launchers and planes in more than 100 locations in Beijing, Tianji and Hebei.
Scientists say that in many parts of the world there has been an implicit or explicit faith in cloud seeding, so seeding has not been carried out under carefully controlled conditions.
With all these doubts and suspicions, China has come forward to try its luck during the Olympic games.
They may be successful if there is no rain and seeding the cloud will get good support.
Once one of my friends told me that rain can be created by Homa performed in open air for certain number of days.
It is a common practice in certain parts of India where the rain is scanty.
It appears the fumes come out of the Homa pit by igniting fire in certain types of wood and ghee goes up in the atmosphere and mix up with the clouds and rain falls. These are some of the good old beliefs people still holds when they are in trouble.
Let us see how far the Chinese is going to be successful with cloud seeding during this Olympic Games.
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Article Tags: Sports, Olympics, Rain, Cloudseeding Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/science-articles/stopping-the-rain-470127.html About the Author:
Retired Professor
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