""The plan marks a major expansion of China’s “weather modification” efforts, deployed for years in Beijing to sometimes mixed results. Cloud-seeding – accomplished by shooting shells or rockets filled with silver iodide particles into promising puffs of white – was instrumental in clearing the smog out of the skies during the 2008 Olympics and has helped relieve the capital from chronic water shortages. But the effort has occasionally gone horribly, and expensively, awry.
Existing weather modification operations in Beijing and the northeastern province of Jilin currently produce 50 billion cubic meters of artificial precipitation, the China Daily said, citing the China Meteorological Administration (CMA). The number could read 280 billion cubic meters if “more effective weather intervention measures are taken,” the paper said.""
""“Because clouds are boundless, weather control is boundless,” CMA official Zheng Jiangping was quoted by China Daily as saying.
The paper said the new rainmaking programs would be established in the northwest, south, southwest and north but added that specifics of the plan had yet to be set. The program was expected to cost roughly 1 billion yuan ($157 million) according to an earlier China Daily report.
Although the techniques used to marshal the weather are modern, the ambition itself is as old as, well, the Mandate of Heaven. One of Beijing’s most famous landmarks, the Temple of Heaven, was built so that Qing Dynasty emperors would have a place to beseech higher powers for plentiful rain and good harvests.
Appropriately, the latest goals for rainmaking are linked to Beijing’s aim of maintaining annual grain yield at about 550 million tons through 2020.""
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/12/09/china-aims-to-bypass-heaven-in-securing-rain-for-crops/
No comments:
Post a Comment