Today we talk about the most fascinating technology that has been used for many years. We all like rain but what’s your reaction if I said that now humans have the technology to control rain. Many countries like China have spent millions of dollars on this technology. It is very useful technology for many purposes but if human control rains then it helps in the water crisis in our country and there are prolonged droughts in some places, in other places, there may be excess rainfall causing floods, or water shortages, to solve all these problems, why isn’t this technology used? We will discuss all about cloud seeding. `
How Clouds Forms?
Before understanding cloud seeding technology, we need to understand about the cloud. What are clouds and how do they form? We all studied in school about three states of matter. { Solid, Liquid and Gas } If we talk about water, there are three states of matter of water are Ice, liquid water and gaseous water vapour. If something is converted from one state to another, that process has a name. When ice turns into water the process is called melting. If water turns into ice, then it is freezing. If water turns into water vapour, it is evaporation or vaporisation. And if water vapour turns back into water, it is known as condensation.
There is lots of water vapour in the air. If there is a lot of water vapour in the air, then we will say that there is a lot of humidity in the air. This water vapour rises in the atmosphere, with the increase of altitude, the colder it gets. Like, it is very cold in the mountains. Now , when this water vapour is at a higher altitude, it condenses due to cold. This water vapour turns into water. Extremely small, tiny water droplets. When these water droplets are suspended in the air, we see clouds. Actually, these are clouds.
The Two Types Of Clouds
And there are millions of such droplets in a cloud. If a cloud is at an even higher altitude, the atmosphere is even colder. This means that not only does it condense, but it also freezes. These water droplets turn into tiny crystals of ice and these ice crystals form the clouds. So, in this sense, there are two types of clouds. One is made of water droplets and the other is made of ice crystals. The difference between the two can be easily seen. The ice crystal clouds are at a higher altitude. You cannot see a clear boundary line and they are thinner. The heavy clouds that are closer to the ground are made of water droplets.
How Do These Clouds Rain?
Now that we have understood this, the next question is how do these clouds rain? What happens is that these small droplets, when they keep accumulating, more droplets keep joining in, the clouds keep getting bigger, these small droplets start colliding with each other, they mix with each other and form big droplets. These big droplets go up into the atmosphere and freeze to form ice crystals but the ice crystals also collide into each other to form bigger ice crystals. This process continues until the ice crystals become so big that they start falling on the ground due to their weight. And when this happens, the ice crystals fall on the ground. While falling down, if the temperature of the air is cold, then they will fall like snow, that's a snowfall. If the air near the ground is warm, the ice crystals will melt and fall like rain droplets. This is how it rains.
Discovery Of Cloud Seeding
Now, if we talk about Cloud Seeding, then in the history of humans, this technology has been introduced by chance, due to an accident. For such accidents, there's a word in English, Serendipity. It means, by chance, something happens that ends up benefiting us. A big example of a serendipitous discovery is the discovery of a vaccine. When Dr Alexander Fleming invented penicillin, it was an accident. I talked about it in detail in the video on the Red Plague. If you haven't seen it, I'll put the link in the description below. Cloud Seeding was also a serendipitous discovery. In 1943, Dr Vincent Shaefer was an American chemist and meteorologist. He was researching aircraft icing and precipitation.
In 1946, he used a cold box for his research. A box that was very cold. While testing something else, during his experiments, he often breathed out in this cold box. As you know, when we breathe out of our mouth it contains water vapour, and if it's cold outside, it will condense. He noticed this while doing the experiment. You can see this yourself, when you go out in the cold weather and breathe, it feels like you are breathing out smoke or fog.
Actually, what you see as smoke or fog are the same tiny water droplets. The water vapour that you breathe out gets condensed into these tiny droplets. Exactly the same process that forms clouds. So it's not wrong to say that you can blow out a mini cloud during winter. Dr Shaefer also noticed the same thing but he took it one step further. He wondered about what would happen if he cooled the box down further. To do this, he used dry ice. Dry ice is basically a solid form of carbon dioxide. It is commonly used for refrigeration and cooling. And it exists only at a temperature of -78°C. So he placed some dry ice in the cold box. And then when he breathed out into that box, he saw something miraculous.
The air that he blew out suddenly turned into millions of microscopic ice crystals. He saw it as a blueish haze. He noticed that if the temperature is reduced suddenly, then the water vapour will instantly turn into ice crystals. This thing happens in clouds at the last stage. When those ice crystals become huge and heavier than the atmosphere. He saw that using dry ice has sped up this process. Dr Shaefer immediately conducted more experiments to understand what was happening exactly. Finally, when he understood things, he realised that it can be used in real life as well. Why not try to instantly cool the clouds in the sky by using dry ice, so that we can get instant snowfall or rain.
First Time when Cloud Seeding Done
On 13th November 1946, Dr Shaefer flew a plane from New York. He took 2.5 kg of dry ice with him on this flight and conducted his test on a cloud near Mount Greylock. He literally threw crushed dry ice out of the plane, on top of the clouds, and the result was amazing. He saw instant heavy snowfall and rain. And this was the invention of Cloud Seeding. Today, Dr Vincent Shaefer is credited for inventing cloud seeding.
Another theory for Cloud seeding
But before him, there was another man, Wilhelm Reich, he claimed to have invented a cloudbuster machine in America. He claimed that by using Orgone energy, by using cosmic energy, he could manipulate the atmosphere and cause rain. He named his research Cosmic Orgone Engineering. But as you can guess, he was a person who made fraudulent claims. His machine didn't work at all. It was simply a way to steal the credit. Interestingly, there was another scientist apart from Dr Shaefer who was working on cloud seeding technology but from a completely different perspective. Scientist Dr Berhard Vonnegut. He didn't want to use dry ice to make the clouds colder for cloud seeding to work. He wanted to use a chemical to carry out the process.
Conditions For Cloud Seeding
His idea was based on the condensation property of water. Something that you may not know is that the process of condensation has a condition. To convert water vapour into water, to undergo the process of condensation, a non-gaseous surface is required. That is, a solid or liquid surface is required to complete the process of condensation. If there is no surface, condensation cannot happen. It is said that without this surface, water vapour will remain as water vapour even if the temperature falls to -10°C. You may say that I claimed earlier in the video that water vapour condenses when the air cools. How can that happen without any surface? There is a surface, of course.
The small dust particles in our atmosphere, the pollens floating around in the air, act like surfaces to carry out the condensation process for clouds to form. The thing is, the better the surface, the faster and better would condensation be. A practical example is in your bathroom.
When you take a shower if there are glass surfaces around the shower area, you can see condensation on the glass.
The water droplets collect on it. Or when there's high humidity. You might have noticed that in winter, around the corners of windows, there is a lot of condensation, water droplets form there because there is a lot of humidity inside the house, high water vapour content in air so, the water vapour condenses when it meets the cold glass on the windows. And that glass provides a surface for the condensation.
This was Dr Vonnegut's logic If a better surface can be provided, the condensation process will be faster. He experimented with chemicals like silver and iodide. Using silver iodide, he found that actually, silver iodide is a good surface for water vapour. Silver iodide has the property to absorb a lot of moisture. So water vapour gets attracted to it and gets converted into water.
Today, we know about several materials like silver iodide, which can absorb the moisture around them. We call these materials Cloud Seeds or Cloud Condensation Nuclei. Like Dr Shaefer threw dry ice on top of the clouds, we can use these cloud seed materials and throw them on the clouds, to speed up the condensation process. So that we get rain. You may think that this is a new technology, but both these methods were already being used by General Electric in 1946. And at that time, it was a revolutionary discovery.
Methods To Do Cloud Seeding
For the first time in history, humans were able to control the weather. After that, the process of cloud seeding gradually improved. First of all, people realised that the method of cloud seeding by using aeroplanes to throw cloud seeds on clouds is very expensive. An alternative to this was to shoot up rockets from the ground which contained cloud seeds so that they could collide with the clouds and scatter the seeds.
The Best Use Of This Technology
As soon as the people and governments of the world came to know about this invention, everyone started looking for ways they could use this cloud-seeding technology for their own benefit. In November 1955, the king of Thailand launched the Thailand Royal Rainmaking Project. He was among the first few people to realise that we can use this technology to counter the effects of drought. In Thailand, farmers were often suffering due to droughts. This method suggested by the king was somewhat successful.
Today, this program is run by the Department of Royal Rainmaking and Agriculture Aviation in Thailand. Later, in 2001, the Eureka Organization awarded the king of Thailand for this.
First Time Cloud Seeding Use In India
Cloud seeding operations were conducted in India in 1983, 1984-1987, and by the Tamil Nadu government during 1993-94. When Tamil Nadu was faced with a severe drought situation. The Karnataka government initiated cloud seeding in 2003-04. And in Maharashtra, a US company, Weather Modification Inc. conducted operations the same year. We will talk about how successful these operations were later, but before that, many countries realised that they could use cloud seeding to stop the rain too. If you look at the overall process, what are we doing here? We are speeding up the condensation process. We are trying to get the water droplets in the clouds to rain as soon as possible. So if on a specific day, in a specific area, we want to prevent rain then over the last several days cloud seeding needs to be carried out in the surrounding areas. That means the water droplets in the clouds would have already rained and there would be no more clouds.
China Use Cloud Seeding In Beijing Olympics
For no rain on the few specified days. This exact technique was used in 2008 by China during the Beijing Olympics. They wanted to avoid any rain during the opening ceremony so that there would be no problems. After this, in February 2009, China used iodide sticks when a drought in Beijing was expected. To counter that, they made snowfall in the Beijing area. It snowed for three days and they had to close 12 roads due to snowfall. And now they plan to revive the Yangtze River using this process. It won't be easy to revive such a big river but with proper planning, it might be achievable. In fact, with proper planning and proper utilisation of resources is there anything that cannot be achieved?.
Cloud Seeding Helps in Agriculture
Snow reminds me of the many ski resorts in the USA which use this process to ensure sufficient snowfall. Because ski resorts need reliable snowfall for people to ski. If there is no snowfall, the resorts will go out of business. So they use this process to artificially produce snow. These were direct uses of cloud seeding. Apart from this, did you know that cloud seeding can be used to reduce the size of hailstones. So that they don't cause heavy damage. Or the fog that we see, it can reduce the amount of fog, especially around airports, so that flights can stick to their schedule.
Some airports around the world do use this to control the fog. Bulgaria is a good example of this. The National Network of Hail Protection was formed in Bulgaria. They strategically planted rockets of silver iodide around the farms. When it is expected to hail, they use the rockets to control it. It takes only 10 minutes to do this. This strategy proved to be very effective. And the data collected since the 1960s has proved that the heavy losses in the agriculture sector were avoided due to this technology.
Pros and Cons Of Cloud Seeding
Now, every technology has its pros and cons. It is not possible that there is a miraculous technology like cloud seeding with no harm to it. The biggest obvious concern that is raised about cloud seeding is the long-term impact it will have on our weather. What do you think? Will it have any harmful impact? Most people will say that yes, it might have some harmful impact. But surprisingly, all the studies done so far on cloud seeding have shown no lasting negative effects on the environment. One of the reasons behind this is that if you understand this process in depth, you will understand what this process is.
We are speeding up the effect of condensation. We are not making clouds miraculously. We are forcing the existing clouds to rain instantly rather than later. So if you think about it, you will see that this is not as useful technology as you might assume. We can prepone tomorrow's rain today. Or we can change the location over a relatively short distance. But overall, we cannot add water vapour to the air. Only if there is water vapour in the air, will clouds form. If there is no water vapour, then how will clouds form? How will cloud seeding be useful? This is the reason, friends, why many studies say that cloud seeding is a technology that does not work.
It is not possible to increase the total amount of rain. We do not have any concrete evidence for this, either in favour or against. In the beginning, people were also concerned that using silver iodide could cause injury to humans or other animals in case of high exposure to silver iodide. But only a little silver iodide is used in cloud seeding, so it does not have any ecological, environmental or health impact. And by now you must have understood, friends, how significant the limitations of this technology are. Imagine if the wind is blowing from south to north in India. The rainy season moves from south to north.
First, clouds form around Karnataka and Kerala. Later, these clouds reach Delhi. By using cloud seeding, we can force the clouds to rain in Kerala and Karnataka. Rather than reaching Delhi. Imagine if the winds in India are blowing from west to east. Suppose clouds are passing over the desert of Rajasthan. If we use cloud seeding to bring rain in Rajasthan, the clouds will be exhausted. Had cloud seeding not been used, the clouds might have reached Delhi and would have been heavy enough to rain on Delhi. So, in a nutshell, cloud seeding technology is merely giving us a choice. Do we want the clouds to rain in Rajasthan or in Delhi? Should it rain sooner or can we delay it? We can control only this. We do not have control over creating clouds over Rajasthan if there were none to begin with.
This is not possible. In recent times, new technologies are also emerging for cloud seeding. Such as the recent technology of Cloud Zapping. In this method, drones fly into the sky and give an electric current to the clouds. It has been found that with the help of this electric charge, the small droplets merge together more easily to form big droplets. So, literally, if we provide electric currents to the clouds, they will rain faster. This method is currently being tested in countries like the UAE.
And in some places, it has been suggested that cloud seeding and cloud zapping technology should be used together. Using silver iodide as well as providing electric currents so that clouds can rain faster. This will improve the efficiency of the process.
Wrong Use Of Cloud Seeding Technology
There is only one major example throughout history where cloud seeding technology was used for the wrong purposes. During the Vietnam War in the 1970s. American Air Force launched Operation Popeye which was carried out from 1967 to 1972. It was a highly classified program whose aim was to extend the monsoon season in some areas of Vietnam. It affected the military supplies of North Vietnam. Due to heavy rains, the roads would not be traversable.
The soil would be soft with an increased chance of landslides. It would have a bad effect on the Vietnamese military. The motto of the American Air Force was Make Mud, Not War. They used silver iodide for cloud seeding to bring heavy rains in Vietnam. This is said to be the first and only case of meteorological warfare. Thankfully, no other country has misused this technology since then.
I told you everything about the technology. It is a limited technology. Strategically, it can definitely be used in some places. Such as preventing rain in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Avoiding rain at a cricket match is useful. Or if you have millions of rupees to stop the rain for your wedding, you can use this technology. Overall, for major events, to fight droughts, and to fight climate change, this technology will probably remain useless.