It’s long been the dream of every comic-book super-villain: the ability to control the weather, calling down lightning, tornadoes, and car-size hail to smite your enemies and leave them trembling in your wake – and now such technology is finally within scientists’ grasps.
Okay, so perhaps the super-villain ideal of complete mastery of the more destructive side of the weather is a little far-fetched: more realistically, scientists have been working on cloud-seeding technologies that would allow farmers to create their own rain – potentially solving irrigation issues in places with no easy access to surface water.
As reported over on the New Scientist website, a team of researchers based at the University of Geneva in Switzerland have developed a method of creating clouds using extremely powerful infra-red lasers.
By firing repeated, short pulses of laser light into a specially constructed chamber filled with water-saturated air kept at a chilly -11.2 degrees Fahrenheit, the team have been able to form linear clouds – a precursor to the creation of rain clouds.
The system works by stripping electrons from atoms held in the air – encouraging, the team claims, the creation of hydroxyl radicals which convert sulfur and nitrogen dioxides held in the air into particles capable of acting as nucleation points for water droplets – and with enough water droplets, you inevitably end up with a cloud.
While creating clouds from thin – if somewhat specialized – air in a lab is is pretty impressive, the technology needs to prove itself in a real-world environment to become truly useful. Sadly for the team, super-saturated cold air doesn’t make itself readily available outside the lab.
Despite this, the team believes that it is simply a matter of tweaking the wavelength used by the laser: in early tests over the skies of Germany, weather LIDAR systems were able to detect a distinct rise in the density and size of water droplets in the atmosphere when the cloud-creating laser was fired.
Despite this success – which, it has to be said, resulted in nothing which was visible to the human senses – many scientists are skeptical about the possibilities for the technology: Daniel Rosenfeld, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Jerusalem, has stated that “whatever has been documented in this experiment is of little relevance to natural clouds.”
Despite skepticism, the team have vowed to continue their research – and hope to one day offer farmers a solution to the problematical dry spells that can spell disaster for crops.
