China Will Use Rockets To Ensure Perfect Weather For 2008 Olympic Games

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will fire rockets into the sky to scatter any rain clouds ahead of next year's Beijing Olympics to ensure perfect weather, state media said on Tuesday.

China has already guaranteed perfect weather for the August 2008 Games, but until now had not said how it would make sure its forecast comes true.

Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Association, announced the decision to use rockets in Beijing on Monday, the China Daily said.

Source

Well thats a bit odd. I wonder what their gaurantee is on this? It would indeed be a shame if the games were to get rained out, especially considering they will be performing in a uncovered stadium. I am just not to sure how China can gaurantee it will be able to prevent the rain, or at what cost to their local climate? Has this even been tried before?

[edit on 7/18/2007 by DYepes]

Originally posted by DYepes
Has this even been tried before?

Many times.

Usually in Russia at the time of the great "Parade".

Putin orders the clouds not to rain on his parade

Ten aeroplanes will take to the skies, equipped with cloud-seeding agents in an attempt to induce rain away from the city, allowing holidaymakers and visiting heads of state to enjoy dry weather below.

And Putin was certainly not the first one to use that technology.

Or the last...

Ahh very interesting. So the technique works by seeding clouds to rain in another location to prevent them from pouring over the desired event?

Is this the same process that China will be using? Have there been any documented negative affects of doing this in Russia?

Originally posted by DYepes
Ahh very interesting. So the technique works by seeding clouds to rain in another location to prevent them from pouring over the desired event?

Usually rockets are also used to break up a hail-storm.

But I guess they can be used for this purpose too.

Is this the same process that China will be using? Have there been any documented negative affects of doing this in Russia?

I do not know what China will be using - but the Russians are not alone in this weather controlling technology too. Chinese could have got that from just about anybody. And of course it has negative effects - it is playing GOD against NATURE; who do you think wins this match?

People like the Russians and Chinese like to claim a high success rate for cloud seeding like this. I'm more sceptical. I just hope the weather synoptics in summer 2008 are ripe for a decent public demonstration of how well it works. Be a shame if it were naturally a mostly dry and sunny summer .....

I know it has been done before and talked before alot, but I think the whole idea of changing the weather is a bit creepy. There are natural patterns for the weather and if you mess it up it seems all wrong.

Pretty soon they will be changing the weather so it never rains, never snows, things like that.

Leave the weather alone. :shk:

Originally posted by Essan
People like the Russians and Chinese like to claim a high success rate for cloud seeding like this. I'm more sceptical. I just hope the weather synoptics in summer 2008 are ripe for a decent public demonstration of how well it works. Be a shame if it were naturally a mostly dry and sunny summer .....

I think this thread has been discussed many times.

Cloud seeding has been around for many years in many countries.
But nobody would talk about it, but when it is about "China" everybody wants to talk about it, why?
Why care about what Russia and China be using?
Do you care what America is using or other countries be using?

It doesn't matter if China will succeed or not, it is not you matter, mind own business.

Instead of busying around China, why don't we do some research about cloud seeding in Europe and USA? Will you be surprise if you find out USA has done more cloud seeding than any other countries?

Leave the weather alone?
Why don't you leave the land alone, don't build a city, don't build your house there in New York.
Leave all natures alone!



IT sounds like the OP is not discussing technology but rather guiding people to discredit China and Russia.

Do you worry when you eat your beef? How you get the beef and how did they damage the nature?

Well for what it's worth, I don't believe all the claims of the various firms that do cloud seeding in the USA either

However, the fact remains that Beijing 2008 will provide a huge public demonstration of how well the technique works. Rest assured we'll be monitoring the weather just to see

IT sounds like the OP is not discussing technology but rather guiding people to discredit China and Russia.

No actually if you re-read, I was asking about if this "cloud-seeding" has ever been performed with rockets before. they have to fall somewhere right? My questions were to how the rockets will work to GAURANTEE there will be clear skies and no rain during the olympic games. Everyone is talking about cloud-seeding, but for the most part I remember this is done with planes and baloons. I am curious how it will be done with rockets.

Are they going to explode like warheads releasing all kinds of cloud-seeding materials and processes?

I am just looking for further analysis on how the process with the rockets is going to work. I dont know what their gaurantee will be if it fails. Are they going to cover the complete cost and re-imburse all patrons for the tickets or what have you?

I hope a tropical storm or hurricane hits beijing on that day , see what use their rockets are against the big guys

[edit on 31-7-2007 by DarkSide]

Originally posted by DYepes

No actually if you re-read, I was asking about if this "cloud-seeding" has ever been performed with rockets before.

I believe it's a method used in China for some time now - often to precipitate potential storms before they develop damaging downpours or hail. The idea being that the rocket explodes in the clouds, dispersing particulates around which raindrops form and thus encouraging the rain to fall sooner than it would have done naturally.

I thought weather was formed from areas of high and low pressure interacting. How would a rocket change an area or high or low pressure? Would a rocket just add to the cloud cover?

Water vapour requires a nucleus around which a raindrop can form. Once formed, the raindrop grows bigger until gravity takes over - and down to Earth it comes.

Cloud seeding - whether by aircraft or rocket - is about providing particulates that act as raindrop nuclei - thus making it rain.

Obviously, it only works if there is sufficient water vapour in the atmosphere to start with - you can't make it rain from a clear sky (well, not usually ) and temperature is also important - the raindrops could just evapourate again before they reach the ground. These factors can be determined by such things as high and low pressure and over these we have no control.

Originally posted by enjoies05
I know it has been done before and talked before alot, but I think the whole idea of changing the weather is a bit creepy. There are natural patterns for the weather and if you mess it up it seems all wrong.

That's a fact but then i can point out that genetic engineering and nuclear and fusion weaponry are pretty dangerous as well and you well know how little concern is shown when such things are weaponized... To weaponize the weather is a logical step and what better way to make war than trough forces that can be blamed on mother nature, 'global warming', or other such deceptions?

Pretty soon they will be changing the weather so it never rains, never snows, things like that.

Leave the weather alone. :shk:

NEWS BRIEF: "Malaysia to Battle Smog With Cyclones"
by Chen May Yee,
Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal
Thursday, November 13, 1997, page A19.

"KULA LUMPUR -- Malaysia's war on smog is about to get a new twist. The government wants to create man-made cyclones to scrub away the haze that has plagued Malaysia since July. 'We will use special technology to create an artificial cyclone to clean the air', said Datuk Law Hieng Ding, minister for science, technology and the environment. The plan calls for the use of new Russian technology to create cyclones -- the giant storms also known as typhoons and hurricanes -- to cause torrential rains, washing the smoke out of the air. The Malaysian cabinet and the finance minister have approved the plan, Datuk Law said. A Malaysian company, BioCure Sdn. Bhd., will sign a memorandum of understanding soon with a government-owned Russian party to produce the cyclone."

"Datuk Law declined to disclose the size of the cyclone to be generated, or the mechanism. 'The details I don't have', he said. He did say, though, that the cyclone generated would be 'quite strong'. Datuk Law also declined to disclose the price of creating the cyclone. But, he said, Malaysia doesn't have to pay if the project doesn't work."

WSJ-Malaysia to Battle Smog With Cyclones

Malaysia is to use Russian rain-making equipment to clear the haze which has covered parts of south-east Asia for many months.

The rain machine is designed to produce high winds, creating the conditions which cause clouds and rain. The Russians say the winds will not damage property or the environment - and the Malaysian authorities will only have to pay if the rain machine works.

Russia has a long record of attempts to control climate. The latest, in September of this year, involved Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov. He paid the equivalent of £500,000 to stop rain falling during the day of the capital's 850th anniversary celebrations.

The rain held off, but scientists say it is impossible to assess if the mayor got value for money, or was just lucky, without detailed measurements.

BBC-Malaysia calls in Russian rainmakers

Those who doubt that Katrina, or any other hurricane, could be stopped—or created—can find substantiation in a long-forgotten article by Chen May Yee in the Nov. 13, 1997, issue of The Wall Street Journal.

The article recounts an offer by the Russians to aid Malaysia to create a typhoon to dissipate a pall of smoke that hung over the country—and still does—caused by the burning of large sections of the rain forests in Indonesia and Sumatra.

To quote from the article: Datuk Law Hieng Ding, Malaysia’s minister for science, technology and the environment at the time, said his country “would use special technology to create an artificial cyclone to clean the air.”

The article went on to say that a Malaysian company, BicCure Sdn. Bhd., would sign a memorandum of understanding with a government-owned Russian company to create a cyclone that would cause torrential rains and thus cleanse the air over Malaysia of the smoke and ash.

www.americanfreepress.net...

"Q: Let me ask you specifically about last week's scare here in Washington, and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to deal with that (inaudible), at B'nai Brith.

A: Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a false threat under the circumstances. But as we've learned in the intelligence community, we had something called -- and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."

So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important.

DoD News Briefing
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen

Can alter the climate you say mister defense secretary?

Again, my attitude is, if it's not going exactly right, we're going to make it go exactly right. If there's problems, we're going to address the problems. And that's what I've come down to assure people of. And again, I want to thank everybody.

And I'm not looking forward to this trip. I got a feel for it when I flew over before. It -- for those who have not -- trying to conceive what we're talking about, it's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by a -- the worst kind of weapon you can imagine. And now we're going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world.

Thank you. (Applause.)

END 10:39 A.M. CDT

www.whitehouse.gov...

Slip of the tongue or does he just have war and weapons on the mind?

"Pick up any text book on hurricanes and it will tell you that the one place where hurricanes do not occur is the South Atlantic Ocean. The atmosphere does not provide enough spin near the surface to get them started and winds higher in the atmosphere tend to shear off any that do make a start. Hence, it was with some amazement that meteorologists watched the first ever recorded hurricane develop off the coast of Brazil in the last week of March."

Catarina hits Brazil

Any text book? So who in the news media is going to tell us that these storms are not at all natural when according to the text books they just can not be?

The director of the Russian geophysical observatory of the Russian Meteorological Service, A.Voyeikov, says that the process of making a weather forecast for Russia, the USA, Europe and Canada is much more complicated in comparison with other states. "Atmospheric processes are not stable on these territories, and cyclones may occur absolutely incidentally," Voyeikov said."

Modern technologies unable to predict weather changes

Looks like a threat , and a admission of vulnerability, to me but maybe
the atmospheric processes over these territories are for some strange reason suddenly 'unstable'; whatever that means.

So in closing they are suddenly talking about cloud seeding and the like because they have far bigger things to hide and well understand that blanket denials of such well established realities are becoming ever more difficult.

Stellar

Originally posted by Essan
People like the Russians and Chinese like to claim a high success rate for cloud seeding like this. I'm more sceptical.

UTAH CLOUD SEEDING ACTIVITIES WATER YEAR 2005

So Utah has been doing it for going on four decades but yeah , lets be 'skeptical' about it.

"Relations between neighbouring Chinese cities have become stormy over the use of controversial technology which encourages rainfall.
Drought-stricken central Henan province has been using a method called cloud seeding, in which chemicals are shot at clouds, the China Daily reported.
The method did bring rain to Henan - but not equally to all areas.
Meteorological officials in one city accused neighbouring colleagues of over-using the method, the paper said."

BBC-China rain-making creates a storm

So it' descended to the point where they are accusing each other of theft, but lets just pretend it aint effective.

I just hope the weather synoptics in summer 2008 are ripe for a decent public demonstration of how well it works.

Not required as US uses in Vietnam proved the point very long ago.

Be a shame if it were naturally a mostly dry and sunny summer .....

Nature has ever less to do with it...

"As the heat wave continues to fry Greater Toronto, residents are left with a burning question: Why has this summer been so hot and humid?
The answer is anything but simple."No one wants to answer that question because none of us really knows," said Ellen Wall, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Guelph.

What is clear, say meteorologists, is that air from the south produces warm weather, while air from the north results in cool weather. Unlike last summer, when lots of northerly air flew over Toronto, most of the air this summer has its roots in the Gulf of Mexico and the pollution-thick Ohio valley, said David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada.
This southerly air explains the warm temperatures, said Phillips.
What is not known is why the high-pressure system that has hovered over Toronto in recent weeks, resulting in week-after-week of record-breaking heat, has refused to budge."

Toronto Star-Why is this summer so hot?

So no one knows but because it MUST be natural we must supposedly keep looking for 'natural' explanations that simply do not exist; science at it's best i tell you.

Originally posted by Essan
Well for what it's worth, I don't believe all the claims of the various firms that do cloud seeding in the USA either

You obviously would not as you would be out of a job if the weather were no longer up to nature and instead up to regional or governmental design. I understand that you are saying these things in self interest but obviously i am not presented with the same problem.

However, the fact remains that Beijing 2008 will provide a huge public demonstration of how well the technique works.

The technology works , they applied the same techniques to reducing hurriance intensity in the 60's.

He is proudest of his award from the secretary of Navy, which says, "Lt. Livingston directly participated in project flights in a combat zone, in program planning, scientific data collection and evaluation ... his unwavering devotion to duty were major factors in the outstanding success of the project and were instrumental in the development of a unique, major combat capability for the United States."

Before receiving the citation, Livingston was invited to the White House where he briefed President Lyndon B. Johnson on the effectiveness of weather control activities and the resulting slowing of traffic by the military support trucks bringing supplies to Southeast Asian troops.

"In the 1960s, a national priority of our government was hurricane control," Livingston said. "Silver iodide is used as a nuclei that causes raindrops to form. The original hypothesis is that if you get enough rain or cool air into a hurricane you can diminish its velocity and strength. When I left the military in the 1960s, we had the ability to do that, and reduce wind velocity in hurricanes by 25 percent and damage caused by a hurricane by 63 percent."

Livingston said his research of hurricane control was confirmed by the Stanford Research Institute. The program of controlling hurricanes, though, was mysteriously dropped by the federal government because of, as he termed it, "politics and professional jealousy." Livingston said powerful Washington lobbies control areas preventing the reinstatement of the hurricane-reduction program, and when asked why it has not yet been resinstated, Livingston cites what he calls an "industry of destruction."

www.mywesttexas.com...

Rest assured we'll be monitoring the weather just to see

Although hurricane forecasting is an inexact science, an investigative series by The Miami Herald suggests it could be considerably more accurate if the National Hurricane Center's equipment functioned better and its research efforts were bolstered.
The newspaper's study of 45 hurricanes that have struck land since 1992 indicated significant failures of buoys, weather balloons, radar, sensors and aircraft that hindered the tracking of nearly half of the storms. Forecasters are, in the words of one science officer, "forecasting blind'' because of inadequate funding and -- to a lesser extent -- misallocation of resources.
Budget constraints that grounded the center's uniquely equipped Gulfstream jet, coupled with critical data lost because of computer crashes, may have caused forecasters to fail to predict damage from Hurricane Katrina in South Florida and delayed evacuation warnings to New Orleans. Missing weather balloon readings, malfunctioning observation stations and a failure to fly planes equipped to measure wind speeds may have contributed to an inability to anticipate the power of Hurricane Charley when it shifted course and slammed into Punta Gorda, Fla., killing 35 people.
Hurricane researcher Mike Black told Herald reporter Debbie Cenziper that putting proper equipment in place could improve hurricane tracking by 20 percent and intensity forecasts by 50 percent. That could save lives and many times the needed outlay in economic losses, especially in an era of increased hurricane activity.
Congress needs to set aside more money for hurricane forecasting, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration needs to do a better of allocating resources.

Indystar-Forecasting trouble

I am by no means convinced they will gather the type of information that would 'disprove' what they do not want shown false but maybe you can provide me with some evidence that you and your fellow scientist ( well most of the time at least) are evaluating this critically?

Stellar