Is it possible to manipulate weather

And they occurred in just one month this year — September — in just the United States. The right amount of sun and rain brings healthy crops, safety and prosperity. Too much or too little — starvation and death. In fiction, people can alter the weather. None of this is possible in reality. No one can deter a hurricane with gunfire despite rumors to the contrary. No one can tame a tornado with liquid nitrogen although someone has obtained a patent for the concept.

Still, people are changing the weather. Weather modification, of a sort, has been possible since the s. We can now cause some clouds to dump extra moisture on demand. There even is debate over whether programs should be developed to undo such changes with geoengineering.

Two planes take off and fly into the clouds. On the ground are mobile radar stations that for weeks will be snowed in place. Atmospheric scientists control all of this equipment, waiting for an experiment to start. Orographic refers to something that is related to mountains. The scientists here are studying cloud seeding , a method that aims to boost how much rain or snow falls from the sky. Cloud seeding got its start in He wanted to chill the cloud, so he put dry ice — frozen carbon dioxide — into the chamber.

Instantly, the chamber was full of ice crystals. To get this into a cloud, scientists first mix the compound with a flammable material. That material is then burned, sending smoke filled with silver iodide particles up into the cloud. Those particles become nuclei that can allow liquid water raindrops to freeze and become ice crystals.

High in a cloud, water vapor will condense around these newly formed ice crystals, causing them to grow. When the crystals get big enough, they fall to the ground. This is similar to what naturally happens in a cloud that will go on to produce precipitation.

Once cloud seeding was discovered, scientists started wildly speculating about what might be on the horizon. An end to hail. Filled drinking-water reservoirs. Prevention of deadly ice storms. Changing the path of tornadoes.

In the s and s, the United States and other governments invested heavily in weather-modification research. They saw potential not only for helping their people but also for aiding the military. Weather control could be a potential weapon. It also could let armies guarantee they got the weather they needed for a particular operation. Not every attempt at cloud seeding ended with rain or snow.

And even in those that did, it was impossible to tell if the seeding caused that precipitation or if the rain or snow would have fallen on its own. In time, money for cloud-seeding research dwindled. More effort was put into improving weather prediction. Weather modification did not, however, disappear. More than 50 nations now have cloud-seeding programs, according to the World Meteorological Organization. China, for instance, set off hundreds of rockets to seed clouds in In total, the three successful days produced about Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, the team say.

Tessendorf agrees there are still significant challenges. But they could only demonstrate the effect on three days when there was no natural precipitation. Worse still, clouds vary. All this suggests that cloud seeding may not be cost-effective.

For example, farmers can shift to less wasteful forms of irrigation, he says. Sign up to our free Fix the Planet newsletter to get a weekly dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox. Read more: China is building a huge weather-control machine — will it work? Read more: Laser creates clouds over Germany. It is mostly used to add water to areas with chronic drought, and even a small percentage increase could go a long way toward creating better agricultural conditions.

It can also prevent or reduce damaging weather, such as hail, hurricanes and tornadoes. In the Canadian province of Alberta, in , scientists attempted to use cloud seeding to mitigate a hail storm. They hypothesized that seeding the clouds would redistribute the water vapor in the clouds to form smaller hailstones rather than the golf ball-sized hail that was predicted.

Radar data collected afterward showed that the storm was 27 percent milder than the original forecast. In places that are prone to severe storms, even a slight reduction in hail intensity could save millions and easily offset the cost of a weather manipulation program. Cloud seeding is still an imperfect science with room for progress, but one with potential to positively alter the way weather affects our lives.

Farming on Mars may be possible even without terraforming it first The Martian soil just needs a. Technology has drastically changed the practices of animal conservation giving scientists up-close perspectives of threatened species. Weather manipulation uses techniques such as cloud seeding to squeeze water from clouds.

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