As-salting The Clouds
By Anne Pawsey
“Royal Rainmaker” is one of the more unusual job titles, but in Thailand that is exactly what people are paid to do. Every day up to six old planes leave a Bangkok airstrip and go off to hunt down wandering, lonely clouds.
Once a cloud has been found the plane’s crew shovel salt on to it in an attempt to persuade it to rain. The salt encourages the water vapour in the cloud to form large droplets which will then fall as rain.
The technique is fairly successful; farmed clouds allow more crops to survive the dry season before the rains arrive.
Cloud farming has been especially important this year as the El Niño effect has caused the dry season to be even harder for farmers than usual.
However, it is not always a flourishing triumph. The planes tried to create rain to put out forest fires last year but they were seriously hampered by the fact that there were no clouds to seed.
Of course in England we have no need for planes full of salt; we have an infallible method of rain-making: cricket.
Get more from Anne or weather the science storm here:
- Strange - How to stay dry in the rain
- News - The Sun shows us its flare
- Strange - Some words about snow
- News - Lakes recover from acid rain
Once a cloud has been found the plane’s crew shovel salt on to it in an attempt to persuade it to rain. The salt encourages the water vapour in the cloud to form large droplets which will then fall as rain.
The technique is fairly successful; farmed clouds allow more crops to survive the dry season before the rains arrive.
Cloud farming has been especially important this year as the El Niño effect has caused the dry season to be even harder for farmers than usual.
However, it is not always a flourishing triumph. The planes tried to create rain to put out forest fires last year but they were seriously hampered by the fact that there were no clouds to seed.
Of course in England we have no need for planes full of salt; we have an infallible method of rain-making: cricket.
Get more from Anne or weather the science storm here:
- Strange - How to stay dry in the rain
- News - The Sun shows us its flare
- Strange - Some words about snow
- News - Lakes recover from acid rain
Image: Matin Dadfar
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