Making rain? Rubbished idea that may work
By IANSMonday, January 31, 2011
LONDON - At the height of the Vietnam War, soldiers who heard US aircraft flying high over the Ho Chi Minh trail might have feared bombs were about to fall from the sky.
In fact, the airplanes were just trying to make it rain, but they were not very good at it.
The plan was that once enough droplets gathered together, their weight would make them fall from the sky as rain.
The resulting deluge would turn the Vietnamese supply lines into a quagmire and halt the communists in their tracks, says Michael Brooks, who filed the report for the Daily Mail.
“Operation Popeye” started in 1966 and ran for seven years. Pilots flew 2,600 rain-seeding sorties, but it was a dismal failure.
Brooks is the author of “13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries Of Our Times.”
Fast-forward four decades, and you will find the same idea, and the same controversial result, is back in play.
A Swiss company called Meteo Systems claims to have seeded more than 50 rainstorms over the Abu Dhabi desert last year. Some scientists have rubbished the claims.
“The Meteo Systems claims are really nothing more than that - it is a simple example of a chance outcome,” says Deon Terblanche, weather modification expert at the World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland.
Others say they might be true.
Meteo Systems uses a technology that is new to this field: A network of towers that use electricity to charge the air. The ionised air then seeds rain.
Professor Peter Wilder of Technical University of Munich in Germany says he did not see the rain fall in the desert but is keeping an open mind about the new idea.
