While rappers around the world are obsessed with making it rain every month on time, Beijing just wants it to stop. In a "when you have a hammer the whole world looks like a nail" situation, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau has been assigned the job of preventing rain during the upcoming Olympics because, at least in part, there's no roof on the fancy new Bird's Nest stadium. And it's working. Mostly.
"Our experiments with rain mitigation have been aimed at light rain," Zhang Qian, head of weather manipulation at the bureau, told a conference. "With heavy rain it is more difficult. The results with light rain have been satisfactory."
That's right, don't worry about the poison air. Just stop the rain.
The main goal is to stop rain from ruining the opening ceremonies on August 8. The rest of the events are apparently less of a concern. So it's probably for the best that Blade Runner was disqualified, those things don't look like they've got the best traction.
GoForce Meterological Control Unit Team! uses different methods for different clouds. If the cloud is below zero degrees Celsisus, it gets seeded with liquid nitrogen to make the droplets smaller, but more numerous. For warmer clouds, the group seeds with agent silver iodide to speed up the droplets, forcing them to collide and combine more frequently, which produces a downdraft and suppresses the cloud formation. America, though, is skeptical.
Russia employed similar techniques for parades, but it focused on seeding clouds to make them rain before they hit the parade grounds, an option Beijing is also looking at. That has the added benefit of clearing out some of the gunk in the otherwise heavily polluted air. It does mean, however, that if you're not at the stadium, you're going to get drenched.
Historic patterns show a 50% chance of rain for the opening events, which China is combating with 3,000 people with 7,000 cannons and 4,687 rocket launchers.
Fantastic.
"Rain mitigation is a very complex process, though," Wang Yubin, deputy chief engineer at the bureau, added.
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