10 Times People Tried to Control the Weather
10.
Fog Dispersal
With the advent of flight over the past century, fog began to be a serious problem for aircraft
trying to take off or land safely.
And in WWII, pilots no longer had the luxury to sit around and wait for the fog to lift
on its own before taking off.
That’s why in 1942 the Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, ordered the Petroleum
Warfare Department to come up with an idea to solve this problem.
The result was FIDO, or Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation.
By burning petrol around the airfield at a rate of 100,000 gallons per hour, engineers
were able to produce enough heat as to temporarily lift the fog, thus allowing the pilots to
safely take off or land at a moment’s notice.
According to the British RAF (Royal Air Force), 15 airfields were fitted with this capability
in England, as well as a few others in the US and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.
Between 1943 and 1945, some 2,500 aircraft landed safely in otherwise dangerous conditions,
thus ensuring the survival of over 10,000 soldiers.
In 1959 the last FIDO installation at RAF Manston was dismantled.
Even today fog dispersal is done regularly at many airports around the world, but the
technology has improved a bit since WWII.
If temperatures are below freezing, CO2 or propane gas is released from the ground in
order to lift the fog.
If temperatures are higher, however, airports make use of helicopters or even burners to
help with the problem.
9.
Hail Cannons
In existence since the late 1890s, hail cannons came about after an Austrian wine grower named
M. Albert Stiger conducted some experiments in his backyard.
The result was an oversized, megaphone-shaped cannon that fired rings of smoke about 985
feet into the air.
It was made out of a sheet of metal, mounted on a wooden frame.
The concept was that a strong whirlwind of air and smoke, blasted into the sky by one
such cannon, will disrupt the normal formation of hail in the overhead clouds.
Hail was, and still is, a major issue and a serious threat to all crops, making the
hail cannon a true scientific blessing for farmers.
After a few seemingly successful tries, the number of hail cannons in the Italian province
near Venice alone had skyrocketed from 466 to 1,630 in less than one year.
But as these cannons became more and more common throughout other parts of Europe, reports
of inconsistencies began to surface.
These were initially disregarded on the grounds of improper firing, shooting delays, or poor
positioning.
Then, in 1903 the Italian government arranged a two-year-long experiment involving 222 cannons.
The regions involved in the experiment still experienced hail, the cannons were deemed
a failure, and the whole concept was soon abandoned.
Perhaps surprisingly, these cannons are still in use today.
One company that makes them says that their cannons work by creating a shockwave traveling
at the speed of sound, disrupting the creation of hail and turning it into slush or rain.
When a storm is close by, it begins firing every four seconds, tracking the storm via
radar.
In 2005 a car manufacturer in the US deployed such cannons, disturbing an entire community
with its incredibly loud noise.
At some point, even the guys at Mythbusters considered testing these hail cannons, but
after some deliberation, they agreed against it, saying that “the methodology makes the
machine completely untestable.”
8.
Cloud Seeding
Besides hail, one other meteorological element that can considerably shrink any crop yield
is drought.
In 1946, a meteorologist by the name of Vincent Schaefer, together with a Nobel Prize laureate
Irving Langmuir, discovered cloud seeding.
This is a form of weather modification which supposedly increases the amount of rainfall.
Rain is created when supercooled droplets of water come together and form ice crystals
in a process known as nucleation.
No longer able to stay suspended in the air, these ice crystals start falling to the ground
and in the process begin to melt and turn back into rain drops.
The logic behind cloud seeding is that some particles like silver iodine or dry ice can
kick start this process and enhance the raining capabilities in clouds.
These particles can either be delivered by plane or sprayed from the ground.
But like the hail cannons mentioned above, it is particularly difficult to prove their
effectiveness.
Even to this day, there is no sure way of knowing if any given cloud will actually produce
rain or not.
Nevertheless, cloud seeding has been reported as being a success in initial trials in countries
like Australia, France, Spain, the US, the UAE, and China.
However, cloud-seeding expert Arlen Huggins, a research scientist at the Desert Research
Institute in Reno, Nevada, said in an interview that nobody can attribute any given storm
solely to cloud seeding.
In fact, the process works best not in periods of drought, but when there are normal or above
normal periods of precipitation.
At best, cloud seeding should increase the amount of rain or snow by up to 10%, and this
excess water can be stored for later use.
7.
Project Cirrus
As early as 1946, the US Armed Forces began testing cloud seeding, trying to discover
its true potential and what other uses it might have to benefit the country.
They made a total of 37 test flights in the first year and a half, flying over thunderstorms,
line squalls, and even tornadoes.
One big threat, as many of us know, are the annual tropical hurricanes coming in from
the Atlantic Ocean.
So, in October 1947, Project Cirrus expanded to test cloud seeding on a hurricane traveling
east bound, 350 miles off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida.
They dropped 80 lbs. of dry ice into the raging storm, only to realize that the hurricane
suddenly changed direction and began traveling back towards the United States.
Savannah, Georgia was hit by record-breaking winds of up to 85 MPH, more than 1,400 people
were left homeless, and at least two people died.
The total damage was reported into the millions of dollars, and the project and its participants
were blamed for what happened.
Project Cirrus then relocated to New Mexico and the research continued.
However, not long after their arrival to the area, local tourist attractions began blaming
the team for the unusually wet weather they began experiencing soon after.
Despite the seemingly positive results, by 1952 the project ran out of funding and was
cancelled soon after.
6.
Project Stormfury
Not wanting the research made in the previous decade to go to waste, another ambitious experimental
program was launched in 1962, in order to see if it’s possible to use cloud seeding
to lessen a hurricane’s destructive potential.
Scientists were wishing to decrease the wind speeds of any hurricane by making use of silver
iodine.
Rocket canisters filled with the stuff were dropped into the storm’s eye from an airplane
flying overhead, as well as making use of gun-like devices mounted on the wings, spraying
silver iodine over the storm.
The hope was that these particles would counterbalance the normal convection within the eye of the
storm, thus giving it a larger radius and in turn, reducing the overall wind speeds
generated.
The tests were carried out in four hurricanes over a period of eight days.
Half the time wind speeds decreased by 10-to-30%, while the other half experienced no change.
The lack of any response to these tests was initially attributed mostly to faulty execution
and deployment.
However, later studies have indicated that hurricanes don’t contain nearly as much
supercooled water for cloud seeding to be effective.
Moreover, researchers discovered that some such storms can undergo similar processes
naturally, just like seeded hurricanes would.
It was then concluded that the initial successful tries were actually naturally occurring events,
backed only by the very little knowledge in the behavior of hurricanes at the time.
The last test fight took place in 1971, and in 1983 Project Stormfury was officially canceled.
These experiments weren’t without merit, however, since they helped meteorologists
better understand and forecast the movements and intensities of future hurricanes.
5.
Project Skyfire
At every moment of the day, there are around 1,800 thunderstorms in progress all over the
globe.
And every 20 minutes, these storms produce somewhere around 60,000 lightning strikes.
Unsurprisingly, some of these lightning strikes start fires.
Every summer, 9,000 forest or grassland fires in the US are started this way, causing extensive
loss of timber, wildlife, watersheds and recreation areas.
Project Skyfire was initiated in 1955 by the US Forest Service in the hopes of better understanding
the natural processes that initiate thunderstorms, and maybe decrease the frequency of lightning
as much as possible.
For the first several years of the project, scientists gathered information and began
using silver iodine in high concentrations, in the hopes of overseeding clouds and thus
reduce the number of lightning strikes.
Their results are hard to quantify, due to the lack of any controlled experiments, but
it would seem that initial tests were somewhat successful.
In any case, in 1960 and 1961, the US Army, under name Project Skyfire, attempted lightning
suppression by using millions of tiny metallic pins in order to seed the clouds, instead
of dry ice or silver iodine.
These were actually small pieces of foil oppositely charged at each end.
This material is used today as a form of countermeasure for aircraft trying to evade enemy missiles
or radar.
4.
Operation Popeye – Vietnam War
With the previous projects above, it’s no wonder that cloud seeding was intended for
military purposes at some point or another.
Operation Popeye, or Operation Compatriot, was a top secret military campaign waged in
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
The goal of the operation was to flood the routes between North and South Vietnam during
the monsoon season with as much rain as possible, in order to make roads inaccessible.
The Ho Chí Minh trail was especially targeted due to its logistical importance for the Viet
Cong.
The whole operation lasted from 1966 up until 1972 and consisted of over 2,600 flights over
the regions of Cambodia, Laos, South Vietnam and the previously mentioned trail.
In total, some 47,000 units of cloud seeding material was dropped during this time, at
a cost of over $21.6 million.
If it actually worked or not is still a matter of debate, but it is believe that they were
able to extend the monsoon season by 30 to 45 days.
Also part of the operation were regular flights over the dense jungles, spraying them with
various herbicides in order to provide less material and cover for the North Vietnamese.
Operation Popeye reached the public consciousness when a columnist by the name of Jack Anderson
revealed it in the Washington Post in March, 1971.
The US Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird testified under oath in 1972 in front of the US Senate
that they never actually used any weather modification techniques in Southeast Asia.
Only two years later, one of Laird’s private letters was leaked where he admitted that
he did lie in front of the Senate.
This inevitably lead to the “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other
Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques,” or ENMOD to be signed in 1976
by members of the UN.
3.
Black Rain in Belarus
In April 1986, one of the biggest man-made disasters took place in the former Soviet
Union, present-day Ukraine.
Due to a faulty reactor design and inadequately trained personnel, one of the reactors at
Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, killing many and resulting in the complete evacuation
of the nearby town of Pripyat.
However, this was just the beginning and the worst of the disaster was still to come.
The radioactive cloud that ensued was threatening many large cities in the Soviet Union like
Moscow, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod and Yaroslavl.
In order to prevent such a catastrophe, the Soviet government quickly dispatched aircraft
to fly over the radioactive cloud and spray it with cloud seeding material, in an area
of about 60 miles surrounding Chernobyl.
In the wake of the explosion, people in present-day South Belarus reported heavy, black-colored
rain falling in and around the town of Gomel.
And just before the hellish rain began, several aircraft had been spotted circling the city
and surrounding area, ejecting some colored material.
Moscow has never admitted to using cloud seeding in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster,
but two Soviet pilots later admitted to it.
Alan Flowers, a British scientist and the first Westerner to examine the extent of the
levels of radioactivity and fallout around Chernobyl, discovered that Byelorussians were
exposed to levels 20 to 30 times higher than normal as a result of the nuclear rain, causing
intense radiation poisoning in children.
In 2004, he was expelled from the country for claiming that the Soviet Union used cloud
seeding in 1986.
He said, “The local population says there was no warning before these heavy rains and
the radioactive fallout arrived.”
2.
The Beijing Weather Modification Office
Today, 52 countries are involved in weather modification in one form or another, either
to enhance precipitation or to suppress hail.
But none are more involved in the process than the Chinese.
The Weather Modification Office came into being sometime in the 1980s and has since
grown to around 37,000 people strong; the largest in the world.
These people operate throughout the entire country, but mostly in its northern and northeastern
regions, which are more predisposed to droughts.
They also try to counteract hail, or severe sandstorms.
The Weather office makes use of 4,000 rocket launchers, 7,000 anti-aircraft guns, and about
30 airplanes to achieve its goals.
But besides working on increasing the amount of precipitation, or suppress the fall of
hail, the Bureau also makes sure that national holidays or special events get the weather
they deserve.
In 1997, the technology was used on New Year’s Day to make it snow.
Another of its high-profile operations was during the 2008 Summer Olympics held in Beijing.
During the opening ceremony, some 1,100 rockets were fired into the clouds outside the city,
ensuring a precipitation free evening by making it rain away from the event.
Prior to every October 1, China’s National Day, the government uses cloud seeding over
Beijing in order to make it rain, dissipating pollution and clearing the skies.
Another future prospect for the Beijing Weather Modification Office is to lower summer temperatures,
thus lowering the annual consumption of electricity.
1.
Desert Rain
The weather is created and influenced by our own planet’s rotation, the sun’s rays,
and the moisture coming in from the oceans.
The most we can do, when compared to these natural forces, is minimal at best, and things
should probably remain like that.
But anyway, as the world’s population has increased to numbers never before seen, humans
have moved in larger numbers to regions less hospitable for comfort.
We are, of course, talking about the desert.
Over the past several decades more and more people have begun inhabiting places like the
United Arab Emirates in the Arabian Peninsula, one of the driest places on Earth.
And it’s no surprise that people living there would want a rainfall now and again.
Thus, a Swiss company took advantage of the situation and began building 33-foot-high
towers that produce negatively charged ions.
These supposedly generate the formation of storm clouds.
The theory of ionization has been around since the 1890, being first mentioned by Nikola
Tesla.
However, there was no evidence of it actually producing any rain in the various experiments
conducted since.
Moreover, the Swiss company is unwilling to share any proof or information regarding its
technology and how it actually works, keeping it a closely guarded secret.
There were a few rain storms since the installation was put in place, but scientists at the Max
Planck Institute for Meteorology have said that these were part of an unusual weather
pattern the Middle East was experiencing at the time.