dinsdag 25 maart 2008

Weather Engineering in China

Rainmakers: Inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, senior officials of China's National Development and Reform Commission and its State Environmental Protection Administration meet the press to discuss issues of environment, resources, energy, and emission control (top). Below, one member of China's army of part-time rainmakers mans an anti-aircraft gun to show the international media how he will shoot silver iodide into passing clouds.

How the Chinese plan to modify the weather in Beijing during the Olympics, using supercomputers, airplanes, and artillery.
To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.
First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.
Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Olympic stadium will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over.

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