Saturday, March 30, 2024

China’s sky-high weather goals

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A weather expert is dubious that Chinese efforts to change rainfall, snow and hail patterns would be successful here, and believes they could even deliver the Chinese outcomes far from what is intended.
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Late last year Chinese authorities announced a national “weather modification” plan  aimed at boosting rainfall across millions of square kilometres in a country struggling with water supplies in its pastoral and horticultural regions.

The bold plan aims to create artificial rainfall and snow over 5.5 million square kilometres, an area five times greater than the area of Western Europe. The project also aims to suppress hail over land masses larger than France.

In December China’s state council declared a system would be in place by 2025, thanks to breakthroughs in research and cloud seeding technology.

China is classed as having some of the most volatile weather in the world, and is also well short on sufficient arable land to achieve food self-sufficiency.

Government concern over food security has been heightened during the covid pandemic, and reinforced by the devastating impact of African Swine Fever on its main dietary protein source.

WeatherWatch director Philip Duncan says this is not the first time Chinese authorities have tried to lever Mother Nature in their climatic favour.

“They set up the Beijing weather modification office for the 2008 summer Olympics and were shooting rockets and bullets into the clouds loaded with silver iodide to ensure a dry Olympics,” Duncan said.

The office is reported to employ 37,000 people nationally and is responsible for seeding clouds.

Conversely, efforts this time around also appear to include inducing more snowfall for 2022’s winter Olympics, also held in Beijing.

However, while the 2008 summer Olympics were dry, the practice was blamed for also precipitating a drought in Mongolia.

“It is a controversial practice. In the United States it has been used by ski-fields to bring on snowfall. However, they had the idea you could cloud seed a hurricane to rain out at sea, but decided it could actually lead to a worse hurricane,” he said.

The effectiveness of cloud seeding is hotly debated in academic circles, with a National Academy of Science study failing to find statistically significant support for the practice. 

The practice has been trialled in numerous drought challenged countries since the 1980s, with mixed success.

There has been concern the practice could in fact worsen some weather events, including causing “super hurricanes”.

A cloud seeding experiment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last year resulted in flooding.

While nervous farmers in Northland and Bay of Plenty may be interested in some means of rainmaking in coming weeks, Duncan says efforts to induce rainfall artificially here were unlikely to be successful.

He says the Chinese may enjoy some level of success, given the country’s huge land mass generating a level of stability around weather patterns.

However, New Zealand’s relatively small landmass was surrounded by huge bodies of water that dominate our weather systems.

“In the century before last, they did try it in Otago by firing cannons into the sky, but it did not work,” he said.

Duncan says even the efforts by Chinese may be daunted by nature’s sheer force.

“Humans are so small against the cloud systems. The clouds need to have sufficient moisture in them to begin with. You cannot take some thin, wispy cloud and turn it into a thunderstorm,” he said.

“I would be very surprised if we could do anything, but I would not put it past the Chinese to achieve it.”

In the wake of recent damaging hail events in Marlborough, China’s desire to minimise hail risk through the practice would be shared by growers here.

However, Duncan says investment in hail protection technology, including more advanced forecasting and deployable hail protection netting would deliver a more certain return to NZ growers.

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