After a disaster, it is not uncommon for people to look for answers wherever they can find them. The devastating floods in Texas are no exception.
There are many potential reasons why so many people have been killed by fast rising waters, but what some people have settled is a practice known as sowing clouds. Claim that a cloud start -up known as Rain caused the storm to fall more rain than it would have. However, the data does not support their concerns.
It is true that Rainmaker was working In this area a few days before the storm, but despite the electronic conversation, “the cloud had nothing to do” with the floods, he said Katja friedrichAn atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“It’s just a complete conspiracy theory. Someone is looking for someone to blame”, Bob RampProfessor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois told TechCrunch.
Sowing clouds is nothing new. It has been practiced since the 1950s, Rauber said. It works by spraying small particles in clouds, usually made of silver iodine.
The silver iodide particles mimic the shape of the ice crystals, so when they hit in super-cool water droplets-water that remains liquid below the freezer point-they activate the droplets to freeze on ice. This freezing is important, Rauber said. Ice crystals grow in size faster than over-fried water drops, which means they are more likely to capture enough water vapor to become large enough to fall from the cloud. If they had remained as water overflowing, there is a good chance that they will eventually evaporate.
Only clouds that have a sufficient amount of over -water water are good candidates for sowing clouds.
In the US, most sowing clouds appear in winter near the mountain rows in the west. There, the clouds are formed as the mountains push the air higher, causing cooling and water vapor to concentrate. If they are properly sown, such clouds will release some of this water as snow, which is then held captive as snowshoots, forming a natural tank that, during the spring, melts, replaces the artificial tanks held behind them.
Although people have been sowing clouds for decades, its impact on rainfall is a newer study area. “We didn’t really have the technologies to evaluate it until recently,” Rauber said.
In early 2017, Friedrich, Rauber and their colleagues set up a shop in Idaho to perform one of the most detailed studies on the cloud sowing to date. In three cases, clouds fell for a total of two hours and 10 minutes. It was enough to add about 186 million gallons of additional rainfall.
This may sound like many, and for the western states affected by drought, it can make the difference. The Idaho power seeds many clouds throughout the winter to enhance the amount of water collected behind their dams so that they can produce electricity throughout the year. “Their data shows that it is costly efficient for them,” Rauber said.
But compared to a large storm, 186 million gallons are peanuts. ‘When we talk about this huge storm that happened with the floods [in Texas]We are literally talking about the atmosphere that processes trillions of water gallons, “he said.
If Rainmaker influenced the storm, it was so tiny that it would be little rounding error. But the reality is, it didn’t.
For beginners, the company sowing the nearby clouds before the storm is hit. “The air that passed that area two days ago was probably somewhere over Canada since the storm happened,” Rauber said.
Second, it is not clear whether the sowing of clouds is just as effective in Cumulus clouds that appear in Texas in the summer. They are separate from the orographic clouds formed near mountain ranges and do not respond to the sowing of clouds. For one, they tend to be short -lived and do not produce many rainfall.
Sporor cultivators could try to group more than anyway, but “the amount of rain coming out of these spore clouds is small,” Rauber said.
Those who last long? “The clouds that are deep, such as storms, natural processes are okay,” he said. “These clouds are very effective. Sowing these clouds is going to do anything.”
