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Not Content with Enormous, Weird Buildings, Chinese Government will Also Engineer the Weather at Beijing Olympics

By Carl Alviani - March 27, 2008

in Tech

From MIT Technology Review, a so-bizarre-it-must-be-true story on plans already in the works to make sure it doesn't rain on the 2008 Olympics, no matter what.

The details of how this gets done are mighty impressive, starting with a supercomputer-driven weather tracking system that gives hourly forecasts for the Beijing area, specific to within a kilometer. Once an errant cloud is spotted though, the big guns are hauled out. Literally.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

The obvious implications of technological hubris are dealt with in a smart and balanced way in the remainder of the story, with nods to some of China's other massive technological undertakings like the Three Gorges Dam, and a brief but engaging history of weather control systems across the globe. Worth a read, if only to see what it looks like when you take "designing your environment" to its logical extreme.

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Berae McClary

16 years ago

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This reminds me of something off of Captain Planet. Man, that show needs to make a comeback.
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reader

16 years ago

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don't know the details, but this was done in Russia, St.Petersburg 1996? for Goodwill games. Worked well except for the areas where the clouds were headed, which did not get their rain for a month or so.
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jing

16 years ago

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you cannot fight mother nature. a little flower that needs full sun will not survive in the shade, how are you really going to change the entire rain cycle! common
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Shields

16 years ago

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Maybe the cloud muttered something anti-gov't under it's breath.
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