Artificial rains/ Rainmaking/ Pluviculture is a buzzword these days in the field of weather modification. These terms are usually used in terms of long drought conditions. However, these days term 'artificial rains' are used in order to fight pollution in the regions of Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh and Kolkata. Kanpur and Lucknow are the most polluted cities.
For natural or artificial rains to take place, existence of clouds is a must. Cloud is a huge concentration of water vapors in the air. Under favorable conditions when these water vapors cool down, they turn into water droplets and they are good to pour down in the form of rains.
For artificial rains to take place, persistent clouding is must. Meteorology plays an important role here, because the right information whether clouds will remain persistent matters a lot. This is a complex and consuming process which involves more than one agencies. Being in a dynamic state, clouds need to persist in a particular area for a long duration to bring in artificial rains.
Dynamic cloud seeding solely aims to boost vertical air currents, which push more water to pass through the clouds, which automatically means more rain. As per weathermen, column of seeds should be thick, it should be deep layered because thin layer of clouds won't be of any help in rainmaking. It generally rains on two accounts, one is condensation of nuclei ( comprised of suspended particles like aerosols, dust particles etc. ) and secondly sufficient cooling in cloud is also needed. Cooling in cloud helps in growing the droplet size and once it becomes heavy, it then pours down in the form of rains.
Cloud seeding is the process of combining different kinds of chemical agents, including silver iodide, dry ice and even common table salt, with existing clouds in an effort to thicken them and increase the chance of rainfall. According to the clouds different physical properties, this can be done using airplanes or rockets to sow to the clouds with catalysts such as dry ice, silver iodide and salt powder, to make clouds rain or increase precipitation, to remove or mitigate farmland drought, to increase reservoir irrigation water or water supply capacity, or to increase water levels for power generation.
Month of November is a benign period in terms of any weather activity. Artificial precipitation changes the micro-physics of the atmosphere. Difficulty in doing this lies when the season, time, place and persistent clouds all of them are not in a favorable condition.
In our country, cloud seeding is most appropriate during the summer season. This triggers in generating clouds and at that time temperatures are also suitable.
Image Credit: Abhipedia
Please Note: Any information picked from here must be attributed to skymetweather.com
