clouds disappear with science

tarav · Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2004 5:00 pm Post subject: clouds disappear with science

In light of recent hurricanes, I thought the following excerpt from an ABC News article would be of interest to some of us. It describes how a powder can be used to change moisture into gel as a means of lessening the precipitation from storms. The article describes this process as harmless. However, I wonder if there could be some harmful side-effects from this technique. I can't imagine what they could be. If anyone has any ideas about it, let me know. The article is from 2002, yet I had never heard of this weather modification technique until this week.

Taking On Mother Nature
Is Science Ready to Change the Weather?

By Amanda Onion

Sept. 24, 2002 ? As residents near the Gulf Coast brace for the possible oncoming blast of the storm called Isidore, researchers are busy finding ways of attacking hurricanes, rather than fleeing them.

Sometime in early October, nine massive jets will take to the skies over southern Florida. Each will carry 16,000-330,000 pounds of an unusual arsenal: cloud-busting powder.

Peter Cordani, chief executive of the Riviera Beach, Fla.-based company, Dyn-o-Mat, says that once sprayed into a wet, hovering cloud, the special powder should combine with the moisture and transform into a heavy gel. The gel will then fall harmlessly to the surface and effectively shake out moisture from the cloud.

The hope is that tons of the powder might someday be used to steal strength from an ongoing hurricane.

"Mother Nature is fooled in so many different ways every day," says Cordani, referring to other ways humans alter the planet, such as global warming and deforestation. "This is just a more obvious way. We just want to take a punch out of a storm so it doesn't level your house."

If at First You Don't Succeed...

Altering weather is something people have tried for centuries. Native Americans performed rain dances to encourage downfalls for their crops. Several governments, including the United States and Russia, began "seeding clouds" a half-century ago with silver iodide to increase local rainfall. The U.S. government even used cloud seeding to try and flood out critical paths in the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam war.

But the U.S. government mostly abandoned the concept of changing the weather in the 1970s amid criticism and when a group of prominent scientists concluded it is an impossible task or at least one whose success was impossible to prove.

"The problem is the weather changes you try and achieve by cloud seeding or other methods happen naturally all the time," says Hugh Willoughby, hurricane research director at NOAA and lead author of the report that more or less halted weather modification efforts in the 1970s. "And you can't know the difference."

Others feel we may be ready to try again.

Seeding Clouds With Fat

The Dyn-o-Mat powder consists of a polymer that's also found in fast-food french fries and as a base for pesticides in agricultural fields. It's made in cornflake-shaped flakes so it floats and lingers longer in the air to combine with a cloud's moisture. In a hurricane, the hope is the powder could be spread in cloud layers just outside the eye of the storm. By precipitating moisture out of these outer layers, moisture and energy might be sucked from the eye of the storm and weaken its overall power.

Last year, a smaller scale test indicated it made a small cloud disappear from a Doppler radar screen after jets had sprayed the substance in the vicinity.

"We know it can dissipate a cloud," says Peter Ray, a meteorologist at Florida State University who is helping test the product. "But we don't know what it will do to ice, freezing water and all the other kinds of things you might encounter in a large storm."

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2004 9:11 am Post subject: Re: clouds disappear with science

Tara

Interesting article. We have to be careful not to be too quick to assume it wouldn't work. Human ingenuity can do some pretty amazing stuff. There were doubters all throughout history, but then we overcame the obstacles and made things happen. We developed heavier-than-air aircraft, landed on the moon, built computers the size of calculators, etc... And always people said it coudln't be done. So I'm excited researchers and working on this project. I just hope I'm not below one of their manmade greasey clouds someday.

Chris

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandella

Doc Tiessen · Intern Joined: 27 Sep 2004 Posts: 161 Gender:

The weather is controlled by randomness. Mankind can do relatively little about it. A small water droplet in a hot stone.

Diversity is Good!


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