China announced expansion to weather modification program to cover bigger area than India

China announced expansion to weather modification system
China modifying its weather system, Source: Web

This week, Beijing uncovered strategies to extremely enlarge an experimental weather modification program to cover a region of more than 2.1 million square miles (5.5 million square kilometers), which is above 1.5 times the whole size of India.

A statement, from the State Council, said that China is going to have a developed weather modification program by 2025, and thanks to innovations in the fundamental study and crucial technologies, as well as advancements in comprehensive prevention against safety concerns.

Within the upcoming five years, the whole region covered by artificial snowfall or rain will spread 5.5 million square kilometers, while more than 224,000 square miles (580,000 square kilometers) will be covered by hail suppression modern technologies. Moreover, the statement continued that the system will back agriculture production, disaster relief, grassland fires, and emergency responses to forests. It will help to deal with unusually droughts or high temperatures.

The country has long searched to control the weather conditions to safe farming locations and ensure clear atmospheres for important events. Before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the country seeded clouds to decrease smog and avoid rain before the competition.

China announced expansion to weather modification program to cover bigger area than India
China declared expansion to weather modification program
Source: Web

Silver iodide injected into clouds

As a small brief, cloud seeding has been operating around for few decades, and it performs by injecting a little amount of silver iodide into clouds with a large quantity of moisture, which then condenses around the all-new particles and becomes heavy.

Research powered by the United States National Science Foundation, published at the start of this year, said that cloud seeding can ramp up snowfall in the wider region if the atmospheric conditions are suitable. Moreover, the research was the first to determine definitively that cloud seeding is effective, and previously it had been had to find out precipitation made as a result of the practice from usual snowfall.

The unpredictability had not averted, the country spending hefty amounts on the technology, from 2012 to 2017, China spends more than 1.34 billion dollars on different weather modification systems. Furthermore, the previous year, weather improvement helped decrease seventy percent of hail harm in the westerns are of China, Xinjiang, an important agricultural region, said Xinhua (state news agency).

Besides this, other nations have also attracted and started to invest in cloud seeding, including the United States, interest of China in the technology has emerged some alarm, especially in neighboring country India, where agriculture is massively dependent on the monsoon season, which already has been disordered and turns less predictable as an outcome of climate change.