Beijing to shoot down Olympic rain

Beijing to shoot down Olympic rain

www.cnn.com

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- Beijing will be shooting for the stars in a bid to stave off downpours when it hosts the Olympics Games in 2008.

Using an arsenal of rockets, artillery and aircraft, China will try to blast the clouds out of the sky, a meteorologist told a Beijing magazine, through a technique which falls under the umbrella of "cloud seeding."

(visit the link for the full news article)

I thought that weather manipulation was fake. Guess I'm behind the times.

www.cnn.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

On the cnn page this looks like an older article sorry for that. I just saw a newscast on cnn about this just this morning.

reply to post by Leprekahn


Cloud seeding is a well known technique for manipulating precipitation that's been around since the 40s. I remember reading about it as a kid. Here's more info on wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org...

The story I saw on the news this morning was about the Chinese govt stopping the rain. I'm guessing they're using the same "seeding" technique for this as well? The newscasters were pretty skeptical about the ability to make the rain stop.

As I remember, there is only so much potential for rain in the atmosphere. If you overseed clouds outside of the zone and time where and when you want to prevent rain, there simply won't be enough left to cause much precipitation at all. Kind of like how rain often falls more on one side of a mountain range while the other generally stays dry.

All of this is from what I read years ago. I'm sure the techniques have advanced since the 40s, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they can pretty much do what they're claiming.

edit: as an aside, I wouldn't put much stock in the "bubble headed bleach blondes" who come on at 5. I've learned that skepticism and belief seem very unrelated to knowledge and experience.

[edit on 31-1-2008 by lifestudent]

Yeah I saw a program how the Chinese have made rain before. They are such a bunch of hackers. China is a mess. Even worse than us. A sad sad come down for the people that developed confucinism, the i-ching and the toa.

[edit on 31-1-2008 by rizla]