Cloud seeding used to curb rising temperature in Dubai
As monsoon
hit across the Indian subcontinent plaguing disaster in certain parts, the United
Arab Emirates (UAE) were facing a heatwave with temperatures soaring up to 50
degree Celsius. They found a way to bring relief for their people by employing
Cloud seeding mechanism to bring about artificial rain and thereby dampening the
escalating heat.
Don’t be too
surprised, it’s a method that has been used since the previous half century,
even in our country it has been availed as an alternative to fight the bout of drought
hit areas on multiple episodes.
What is Cloud Seeding and how does it work?
Cloud
seeding is a technique, to engineer the weather by dispersing clouds with fine
particles, to make it snow or rain. Clouds are a collection of water particles or
ice crystals. These come into existence when the evaporated water vapors
present in the atmosphere cools and condenses around a condensation nuclei like
dust or salt particles in air and thus leads to the formation of rain or snow.
For rainfall
to occur these nuclei are vital and Cloud Seeding takes advantage of this fact
by introducing artificial condensation nuclei to the troposphere thereby upgrading
the clouds potential to produce rain or snow.
How UAE did
it?
National
Center of Meteorology (NCM) of UAE deployed the said method by using drones; experts
first located the cumulus clouds ideal for rainmaking, a drone was then dispatched,
which drizzles water onto warm clouds and ejects ice to cold ones.
More drones
follow and spray the cloud with salt particles of silver iodide, potassium
iodide and dry ice. These salt act as the condensation nuclei that pulls the
water vapors into the cloud, which leads to condensation forming water droplet and
eventually rainfall occurs.
Environmental
impact of cloud seeding:
Man-made precipitation
enhancement is not at all environment friendly. Harmful effects include acidification of the oceans, ozone
layer depletion, erratic
changes in rainfall patterns, swift warming if seeding were to be stopped suddenly and an increase in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Silver is a heavy, toxic metal that has negative impact on the health of plants, humans and
animals.
Imbalance of
ecology due to these practices cannot be simply overlooked. For example, in
India, the coastal Andhra region acquire plenty of rainfall, however, Rayalaseema
is an arid region of the same state. By fabricating a downpour in the latter
region we are altering the amount of rainfall in the coastal for that day.
Apart from
having an adverse effect on environment this method is unbelievable expensive.
With the cloud seeding project in Dubai that started in July 2010 amounts to
11million US dollars and the recent artificial rain alone has caused them
approximately more than 4 crore INR.
Similarly, Karnataka’s cloud seeding project (2 years) has cost the state 89 crore.
The scientific world is still in debate when it comes to cloud seeding benefits, from being used as a weapon (United
States-Operation Popeye) to resulting in natural calamities (flash floods) the
scientific world is highly opinionated. What we require is a greener alternative for the said
method so that we may reap benefits without causing any harm to our
environment.
