I Ake It Rain
I Ake It Rain https://tiurll.com/2tDafN
Steve Kerr said he didn't have flashbacks watching Steph Curry and Klay Thompson drain 3-pointers at Paycom Center on Monday night in the Warriors' 128-120 win against the Oklahoma City Thunder, but it was hard not to think of the past when watching the Splash Brothers shine against their old rivals.
For the Warriors, Jordan Poole, Andrew Wiggins, Jonathan Kuminga, Patrick Baldwin Jr., James Wiseman, Moses Moody and the rest of the young Dubs might be leading the way. But on Monday night in OKC, it was time for Steph and Klay to make it rain on the Thunder once more.
The way the process works explains why Beijing is currently struggling to cloud seed: There is a need for at least some clouds to already be in the parts of the sky where you want to induce rain, and some of the regions in China that need water most desperately don't have enough cloud cover for the method to work. Humans still cannot create rain clouds out of thin air.
\"If you make it rain one place then you reduce rain downstream,\" said professor of applied physics at Harvard University David Keith, whose research focuses on the intersection of climate science, technology and policy. He likened the process to \"robbing Peter to pay Paul.\"
The skies around Midland, Texas, lit up and thundered with the brilliance and cacophony of military-grade explosives. But it was far from a wartime scene, as on August 17, 1891, a group of scientists were setting off explosives in the first government-funded rain-making experiments.
Among the group was Edward Powers, a former Civil War general who made the observation in his 1871 book, War and the Weather, that rain frequently occurred in the days following a Civil War battle. He theorized that the loud noise accompanying the events of battle had agitated clouds causing them to release the rain holed up inside of them, and his book documented several battles throughout history and the subsequent rain events.
Born in Chicago, Dyrenforth studied in Germany, where he attended the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe and earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Heidelberg. He served as a war correspondent in the 1861 Austro-Prussian war and later earned the rank of major for the Union Army in the American Civil War. As a patent lawyer, clients came to him with applications for rain-making inventions, and Dyrenforth became obsessed with the idea himself.
But some people, including Dyrenforth, held onto the belief that concussion experiments might have worked. When the mayor of El Paso, Texas, invited the rainmakers to test their methods in the dry desert town, Dyrenforth sent his team to conduct experiments there under the leadership of John T. Ellis.
Later that night, rain began to fall south and southeast of the city, writes Fleming. And although, they were conducting the experiments on the opposite side of town, the rainmakers took credit for the showers.
The rainmakers went on to conduct experiments in Corpus Christi, San Antonio and San Diego with similar inconclusive results. It has since been noted that meteorologists had predicted rain in all of these places on the days that the rainmakers attempted to shake precipitation from the clouds. Even if Dyrenforth and his team were unaware of the predictions, they launched their experiments during the southwest's traditionally rainy season. Precipitation was likely in any case.
Though the concussion theory has fallen out of fashion, the science behind rainmaking continues to evolve. Today, scientists studying weather modification focus their sights on cloud seeding, or the process of inserting silver iodide crystals to make ice droplets in the clouds clump together and fall from the sky as precipitation. A still evolving science, cloud seeding has shown promise but its efficacy is still somewhat unknown.
Edward Powers was not wrong in his observation that rain followed battle. But the likely explanation for this phenomenon is simply that generals tended to avoid fighting on rainy days. So, while Dyrenforth and the rainmakers of the 1890s may have conducted experiments on faulty assumptions, they are just one chapter in the long history of human interference in weather and climate.
The United States, Soviet Union, and other nations often tested nuclear weapons above ground in the 1950s and early 1960s. The fallout contained a devil's cocktail of radioactive elements that can have subtle effects in the atmosphere. Charged particles emitted during radioactive decay can smack into surrounding atoms and molecules, ripping them asunder and creating even more charged particles. Then, that flurry of charged particles can glom onto dust, soot, or water droplets in the atmosphere, sometimes making the droplets hefty enough to fall to the ground as rain.
\"We found that the large-scale installation of solar and wind farms can bring more rainfall and promote vegetation growth in these regions,\" says one of the researchers, atmospheric scientist Eugenia Kalnay from the University of Maryland.
\"Our model results show that large-scale solar and wind farms in the Sahara would more than double the precipitation in the Sahara, and the most substantial increase occurs in the Sahel, where the magnitude of rainfall increase is between 200 and 500 mm per year,\" says first author of the study Yan Li, who began the research at Maryland and is now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (23 July, 2012)_As the world grapples with rising temperatures, scientists are trying to find ways to utilise forests to influence rainfall patterns in areas experiencing water shortages or severe drought.
But the use of forests as a climate adaptation tool requires regional, national, and international coordination, Ellison said, because the increased rainfall will likely occur not over the forested region, but elsewhere.
The former commercial pilot is not some adrenaline junkie courting danger. He is a cloud seeder in Pleasanton, Texas, chasing menacing storms to artificially prime the clouds to deliver extra rain over drought-stricken farmland.
\\\"As a pilot through school you're taught to avoid thunderstorms, give them a 20 to 30-mile berth,\\\" Funke said. \\\"You have to respect them, because they are dangerous, but with the proper training, you can negotiate them safely and do this job.\\\"
Tommy Shearrer, the president of the Texas Weather Modification Association, which operates five cloud seeding programs around the state, was quick to explain that cloud seeding only enhances conditions in the atmosphere to produce more rain, but does not create weather.
\\\"We don't manufacture clouds, and that's what gets me into trouble with a lot of folks who go, 'well, it was going to rain anyway, how do you know it was going to have any effect'\\\" he said. \\\"If you look at the cloud as a factory, we're inducing a lot of raw materials into the factory so that the factory becomes more efficient and consequently more productive.\\\"
The inflow is essentially the lifeline of the storm, where a cloud sucks in moisture in order to produce rain. Once the pilot gets into the optimum position in the cloud, he waits for the green light from headquarters on the ground to start seeding. After an OK over the radio, the pilot releases flares containing silver iodide and calcium chloride particles, which collide with water particles and help produce more moisture.
The radar data collected after a day of seeding adds to a growing body of evidence that the process works. The data shows seeding can double the amount of moisture in a cloud and the Texas programs boast a 12 percent increase in annual rainfall because of seeding.
But despite the data, some of the biggest critics of cloud seedings are the farmers who stand to benefit from it the most. Bill Slomchinski and his family have been farming in Texas for five generations. He and his son Brett said they have to rely on costly irrigation to water their 300 acres of crops. It cuts deeply into their profits, but the Slomchinskis said they are skeptical that anything short of divine intervention can actually produce more rain.
Even though cloud seeding can't end droughts, Funke said every extra drop of water it produces helps feed the underground aquifers used to irrigate crops. So while he can't promise the Slomchinskis more rainy days, Funke is convinced cloud seeding is helping them in the long run. 781b155fdc