Have We Finally Found the Recipe for Making Rain? (theguardian.com) 33
An electric shock might be just the thing to persuade a cloud to produce some rain. New research suggests that supercharging a cloud could increase the attractive forces between droplets and help raindrops to grow. Have we finally found the recipe for making rain? From a report: Electric charge is all around us. Thunderclouds literally crackle with it, but even the air we breathe has some charged aerosols and droplets in it. Giles Harrison, a meteorologist at the University of Reading, and colleagues have been investigating the electric charge of drops in non-thunderstorm clouds. In calculations led by Maarten Ambaum and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, they show that the greater the variation in charges, the stronger the attraction between droplets. "This advances our understanding of how charge influences drop growth and brings a new aspect to answering the age-old question: why does it rain?" says Harrison. Last year Harrison and his colleagues, who have been funded by the United Arab Emirates to research rain enhancement, flew drones equipped with ionisers into clouds and experimented with releasing positive and negative charges into the air. The new results will help them fine-tune these experiments, potentially to find ways to hasten the formation of rain where it is needed.
Why? Simple. (Score:5, Funny)
Because I washed my car -- or went for a long walk.
Re: Why? Simple. (Score:2)
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But...washing your car to make it rain, doesn't work. --Murphy
The three guaranteed recipes for rain. (Score:3)
Was planning a long motorcycle ride for today.
Washed the car.
Large outdoor gathering planned for this afternoon.
Bonus round from my farming days: The hay was mowed yesterday and is almost dry enough to rake for bailing.
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Now that you mention it, I do remember it raining literally every single time I camped with a tent or a pop-up camper. ALWAYS on the tear-down day too.
Supercharging? (Score:2)
How does one fit a belt driven air-compressor to a cloud?
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With a blimp or helicopter.
You don't say! (Score:2)
A newer recipe perhaps (Score:3)
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Yeah the headline makes no sense. The summary doesn't clarify things.
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the Ivermectin rain dance?
Well, (Score:1)
Doc Brown's got the jigawatts ready...
Still, I wonder... (Score:3)
They're seeding the clouds! (Score:2)
The fascists are seeding the clouds, man!
The recipe for rain (Score:2)
2 parts hydrogen, 1 part oxygen
Unintended consequences rain on command (Score:3)
Weather modification already occurs on a fairly large scale. In many jurisdictions, insurance companies seed clouds with airplanes when hail is a possibility. The idea is to get the cloud to start raining out somewhere before it can get near a city and dump hail. And from the stats it seems to be successful. The problem is by doing so it alters local weather patterns and causes some farms to miss out on the rain completely on a regular basis. While it's hard to prove exact causality here, there have been successful petitions in several states to stop the practice.
Plus even if I can get clouds to rain over my farm, what about neighboring farms that get less rain because I took it all. Sounds silly, but there are always potential unintnded consequences!
Re:Unintended consequences rain on command (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like they've been doing this for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Just google for "insurance hail suppression." Besides Alberta, there's also North Dakota. I've also read of several sites in California. It's definitely happening, and it's on a scale much larger than you might think. Also it appears insurance companies aren't willing to comment much on it.
Sounds like a business opportunity. (Score:3)
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Could lead to some interesting geopolitics. "Stop stealing our rain."
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Wouldn't this increase... (Score:2)
the amount of lightning?
Slight control (Score:1)
There is no possibility of rain if there is no water vapor to condense, and also there is no chances to avoid rain if it condense too much.
The most we can aim is to control some indirect variables that could slight control the rain conditions.
For example, there should be a range of pressure, temperature and humidity that turns into rain. Through minor variables like static electricity derived of other particles in very small quantities but great effect, that variables could be moved requiring a little more
Wrong title (Score:2)
should be 'Have we finally found an application for giant Tesla coils?'
Begs the question. (Score:1)
Making it rain? Only a secret to some. (Score:2)
I thought if you made it clap then it would rain. I'll check with some old pros next time I'm at the club. Maybe it's the bouncing and shaking in the right thong?
What? TFS? No...