Can We Control the Weather with Technology?

As the climate around the world reaches new extremes, the big challenge will be trying to mitigate the effects of climate change by changing the way we create and use energy transportation and food production, but could there be other ways to use the

technology

we already have today to try to reduce the size and energy of some of the more localized destructive

weather

events, such as tornadoes and hurricanes, and

control

rainfall. Controlling the

weather

, or weather modification as it is known, has long been the goal of many of those who wish to make things better for their fellow human beings. man, for those looking to make things a little worse by weaponizing the weather and it's not like we haven't been testing one of the most well known methods of weather modification is cloud seeding, this is basically spraying small particles of iodide silver with dry or frozen ice. carbon dioxide, liquid propane and more recently table salt into the clouds using airplanes, rockets and flares, although this method has been used for over 70 years, there is still much debate about how effective it really is, but as far as called the most scientific study on clouds.

The seeding done so far in Wyoming over a six-year period, seeding growing clouds, was concluded to produce about a 10% increase in precipitation, but still, but different areas and conditions around the world could produce more or perhaps have no effect. two basic methods: the cold rain method and the warm rain method. The cold rain method works in more temperate areas where large convective clouds contain supercooled water. Seeding agents, such as dry ice, provide a core for supercooled water to freeze and then travel in updrafts. in the cloud collecting more water as they grow, when they are large enough they then fall and melt into rain on the way down, if the storm is very large and has very strong updrafts, they can become so large that They don't melt in the cloud. very low but falls as hail, the warm rain method is used in tropical areas where the clouds do not reach the freezing point, so a hydroscopic sea is used that absorbs water like salt, instead the small Drops merge as they float up and down. in the downdraft again until they are stronger to fall as rain;

However, if you use too much seed, it can have that effect by creating too many seeds for the amount of water vapor available, so very few of them can grow large enough to become. raindrops and here we have another underlying problem. Natural rain requires a seed to start the process, which would normally be a particle of dust or pollen, but our use of fossil fuels, especially diesel and coal, also creates a large amount of soot which can also act as a seed. So simply driving your car or turning on the heat could be inadvertently seeding the clouds.

This pollution has been blamed for the lack of snow cover in recent decades in areas such as the western US that rely on the clouds that form over the mountains and the snow they deposit for meltwater for their water supplies If clouds are seeded by pollution before they reach the mountains, there will be less snowfall and less water, so seeding clouds over the mountains is considered a way to recover snow and increase water supply, another experiment. Using ionized particles, it has been tested in the Middle East in Abu Dhabi, the idea here is that negatively charged particles are released from the ion emitters and float upwards on convection currents and attach to natural condensation nuclei in the clouds, once charged, would attract. other cores and grow more quickly and hopefully survive longer to produce more rain than it would have done without being loaded so far they say the results have been positive, but more research is required.

A common misconception is that cloud seeding can create rain or snow at will. and anywhere and from clear skies this is false, it can only affect the clouds that already exist and our rain or snow that is carrying or is about to be if there are no clouds or there are clouds that cannot produce rain like the very high ones . cirrus then no amount of seeding will make any difference. It has also been found that clouds that form over the sea are more likely to respond to seeding than those that form inland. Hail suppression is another reason why large storm seeding is being done in parts of a world where hail routinely grows to very large sizes and causes damage to crops, vehicles, buildings, and people, although the exact details of How hail grows in these storms is still incomplete, the idea being that seeding them will cause more supercooled water to fall as rain sooner. and reduce the amount available for hail to form and thus reduce its size.

In fact, it has been discovered that the tips of airplane propellers and also the airflow of their wings can produce ice particles from water vapor in clouds under certain conditions and inadvertently see. clouds that could be wrongly attributed to the seeding itself, but this has not stopped many countries around the world from trying. China has invested heavily in cloud seeding and has even used it to try to make the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics rainy and smog-free, although China says they have had great success, it also has some problems. the world's most polluted skies, further confounding the results, more than 500 solid fuel burners have reportedly been deployed on the high slopes of the Tibetan Plateau to pump silver iodide in an experiment to try to increase the amount of snow and rain over an area of ​​1.6 million square kilometers, but eventually flows into the yellow Yangtze and Mekong rivers in Boeing, iodized silver in the West is increasingly polluting and therefore not used as much, but as They say that one man's gallows is another man's weapon of war and the same thing happened with cloud seeding in the Vietnam War when the US carried out the CIA-sponsored secret operation Popeye from 1967 to 1972 under Under the auspices of meteorological reconnaissance, this was an attempt by Turin to increase the length of the monsoon season with cloud seeding with the intention of causing damage due to additional rainfall to roads, river crossings causing landslides and, in They generally make life difficult year-round with mud for the Viet Cong along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main route. to transport men and weapons to the south, but also covering parts of Cambodia and Vietnam only after the existence of the program was leaked in 1971, operations ceased in 1972 after details of it were published in the New York Times.

This highlights the issue that The effects of increased rainfall do not stay in the area where it was planted or where the rain fell. Flash floods along river courses could occur far from rainfall and even in other countries, so if we can affect the rain beam we should be able to The Cirrus project, which affects storms and the biggest of all cyclones or tropical hurricanes, was a collaboration between the US Army Corps and General Electric to drop crushed dry ice or frozen carbon dioxide from a modified bomber into the rain bands of a hurricane in 1947 and this is in In reality, the basis of all modern cloud seeding, the theory was that dry ice would cause the formation of a new eyewall that would be larger than the previous one, this would reduce the pressure gradient and weaken the hurricane after receiving the storm. , made a quick turn and touched down. near Savannah, Georgia, people were blamed for the redirection of planting and legal action was threatened for the damage caused, halting further lawsuits for more than ten years.

Afterwards, a similar storm was discovered to have caused the same in 1906 and that the storm of 1947 was probably already beginning to spin before planting began and this was stopped for the legal action project Stormfury was a further attempt to weaken hurricanes by the US government. In the US from 1962 to 63 plowing was again misused, this time with silver iodide which mimics the effects of dry ice although it was easier. To handle and last longer, this was supposed to attempt to make the supercooled water in hurricanes freeze and alter their internal structure; However, it was discovered that most hurricanes do not have enough supercooled water and that uncie hurricanes changed in the same way as a one of the crops was expected to make the project redundant in the late 1950s.

He seriously considered the idea of ​​subduing hurricanes, but if you exploded a high-yield weapon over the eye, the enormous rise of air seen in the fireball would absorb the cold. air below and disrupts storm convection currents, but this has some serious drawbacks. The most obvious beam, but it would have spread highly radioactive isotopes through wind and rain and over a wide area. The second problem is that hurricanes are heat engines from which they obtain their energy. of warm, moist air over the ocean, so adding more heat from the explosion will likely make it stronger rather than weaker, and the third problem is the large amount of energy a hurricane is already releasing, than in a typical equals 10 megatons.

The weapon is detonated every 20 minutes, so a succession of high-yield bombs will be needed to achieve the required effect. Since hurricanes are just air and water vapor, the shock wave from the explosion would have little effect on their structure and the water vapor could overheat from the initial burst of X-rays would soon convince again within a short time after add more warming process, so if you can't stop them when they are big, maybe you could stop them when they are developing and just storm out to sea for a hurricane to come. To develop, the sea temperature must be above twenty-six point five degrees Celsius.

About 80 tropical depressions form in an average year in the Atlantic basin, but only about five to ten also become hurricanes, so which ones to choose instead of trying to figure out which ones? could become a hurricane, why not affect them all? There have been several ideas to cool the ocean surface in the area where they are developed using wave-driven pumps, also known as ocean plowing, to even move warm surface water downward or cool deep water upward, the problem here is that thousands of these pumps would be needed to cover a vast area and in small scale tests many of these pumps were damaged by waves.

Another idea already being used in Norway to stop the build-up of icy fjords is to pump air in. In deep water, as air bubbles rise to the surface, they draw deeper salt water, preventing ice from forming. . If this were done in warm ocean waters, it could draw up deeper, colder water to cool the surface and deprive storms of the thermal energy to become hurricanes again, the same problem applies in that it would take thousands of these solar powered pump plants covering a large area to have any effect and yet another idea is to make the clouds more reflective by spraying them with sea water this way. it would reflect more of the sun's energy back into space and cool the sea below.

It has been suggested that this would help combat global warming and if this were done around the equator, it would not only reduce the amount of energy available for storms to form, but it would also help cool the poles, as the goal of atmospheric and oceanic currents is to distribute the heat imbalance from the equator to the poles. However, there is also the law of unintended consequences on marine life and any new weather patterns that may be established if large areas of the oceans were artificially cooled, tornadoes are another deadly storm, but they are quite different from hurricanes, because They are much smaller, with an average width of just 0.8 kilometers, and give little warning of when funnel clouds form.

They last from a few minutes to a couple of hours, but in that time they can cause enormous amounts of damage to anything they encounter. Unlike hurricanes, tornadoes almost always form over land from large rotating storms or supercells. these require cold, dry air over warm, humid air and an unstable atmosphere. atmosphere something that happens regularly over the Great Plains of the central United States in an area called tornado alley because they form in a different way than hurricanes mainly due to the difference between the cold, dry air and thewarm, moist air masses and the side winds they provide.

There have been several theories about how they could be

control

led. One was physicist Bernard Eastlund, who, if you've seen our video on HAARP, was the man behind the idea of ​​the giant iron aspherical heater in Alaska that was supposed to be able to heat the ionosphere to create a lens that focuses the sun's energy in an area perhaps hundreds of miles away. The storm solar energy satellite, as agreed, would be a giant solar collector that will generate electricity and convert it into microwaves, which will then focus on thunderstorms to heat the cold rain streams that disrupt convection currents within the storm cell.

This may seem like a stretch, but if you watched our previous video on space-based electrical power generation, you'll know that they are already testing microwave power link

technology

and satellite-based solar power generators, so It may not be so far-fetched for long, but there are problems with this idea: First, the solar power station and microwave transmitter would have to be in geostationary orbit to stay above the area. and have a 24-hour supply of sunlight for their power, but that would place them over the equator instead of over the center of the United States, 36,000 kilometers away, the beam would also be very wide, up to ten kilometers in diameter , and not focused enough to distinguish the small area of ​​cold air in the downdraft of the storms' rear flank where most tornadoes begin.

Warming the surrounding air more - we already have hot air - could make existing tornadoes even stronger if a satellite were in low Earth orbit. than 400 kilometers, then the beam could be much narrower and more powerful, but it will travel around the Earth once every 90 minutes or so, with only a few minutes over a potential target for its satellite to be over a storm at the right time and In daylight, the better it will be a matter of luck. In addition to planning, you would also have to prevent the high energy from hitting people and livestock on the ground, so it would have to be turned off when over cities and towns.

A variation of this is a ground system with high-power microwave transmitters. mounted on trucks with large generators, this solves the problem of being close enough, but would still need many megawatts, so a convoy of transmitters and generators would have to track storms like storm chasers do now, then they would have to stop and set up with just a few minutes to be effective while also trying to avoid emerging tornadoes in the real world, this simply would not be practical with current electrical technology and transportation, so our best hope is better detection and prediction of where tornadoes can form and maybe. more underground buildings and structures that would not be affected.

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