A few weeks ago it was announced with great fanfare that Morocco was considering abandoning its “cloud seeding” program and switching to desalination plants. And it may seem obvious, but it’s not.
Especially when the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf are celebrating the effectiveness of their own program in style. Are we about to make a big leap in “cloud seeding” or will it be business as usual?
What is cloud seeding? Contrary to what the name might suggest, it does not consist of “growing” clouds out of thin air, nor of artificially creating them. Cloud seeding is a methodology that attempts to “improve the ability of a cloud to produce rain or snow”.
Basically, it uses catalysts (such as salt crystals) to cause the water droplets contained in the cloud to coalesce “into larger, heavier raindrops and eventually fall to the ground.”
That said, it can’t be done arbitrarily: cloud seeding is a matter of monitoring clouds with sufficient moisture as they pass over an area and sending out aircraft to chemically “give them a little nudge”.
It works? Although it doesn’t seem like it, the question about its operation is somewhat misleading. If we look at whether this technique is able to effectively cause moisture to fall from the clouds in the form of rain, the answer is yes: if the clouds are good candidates, these interventions can generate showers.
But if we refer to whether it is a cost-effective technique, the answer is more complicated. It is a very expensive deployment (and very technically demanding both in meteorological monitoring and in the distribution of chemical substances) and the results are relatively bad. After all, dry regions usually have few usable clouds in the sky.
That’s why it’s almost never done. It meant that countries like Morocco, which made headlines a few weeks ago for their intention to commit to this, have their project on the corner for 13 years abandoned. What’s more, this is why many countries don’t even consider starting it: the low return on every euro invested is lower than most alternatives.
However, there are countries in it. China wants programs of this type to cover 5.5 million square kilometers, more or less 60% of its territory, by the middle of the decade. In the United Arab Emirates, The National Weather Center’s Cloud Seeding Division has dispatched 14 cloud seeding flights in recent days. It seems with good results between February 11th and 12th.
The SAE protocol is simple and allows us to get an idea of the process. When their radars pick up clouds that could be “milked”, they send planes to check it out on the spot. If they’re good candidates, they throw in “salt crystals mixed with magnesium, sodium chloride, and potassium chloride.”
Technical details aside, it is true that SAE research improves our understanding of all these methodologies. For example, they found that cloud seeding is particularly effective in convective clouds.
An unpredictable world. We see it every day: if it’s not an all-time high in the North Atlantic surface or an unprecedented average temperature in modern times, it’s that the latest measurements of the planet’s energy balance (that is, the difference between the energy we take in and the energy we let escape into space) show that we are keeping more and more energy. This means that Earth is entering uncharted territory.
And in this context, you never know what you will need. Welcome to the UAE investigation.
Image | Unsplash
In Xataka | For decades, we have been “sowing clouds” in the fight against drought. We now know that it served little purpose.
