My guest today is Dr. Linda Zou, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Khalifa University of Science and Technology. Why are you interested in this type of research? Somerset Dam, that can feed Wivenhoe, also starts to rapidly fill, going from 80% to 148% in one day. Seeding clouds as a way to change weather began its history as a serious science during WWII, originally as a way to interrupt severe storms or to produce rain and snow. 2022. Since the 1940s, scientists have studied ways to increase rainfall with the goal of increasing precipitation in arid and semi-arid climates. The flight path of the Handel Aviation aircraft VH-JIL criss-crossing over flooded areas was also shared online by Australian fashion designer Alice McCall alongside claims it was dropping chemicals to "activate rain.". Feast to Famine: Mass Floods and Australia's High-Speed Rail. Most commonly used to increase precipitation as a drought management technique, cloud . Source: nationalparks.nsw.gov.au Cloud seeding programs in the upper Colorado River Basin, for instance, cost around $1.5 million each year. Everything from wind speed, air movement and updraft, or a current of rising air, can affect a storms strength, Tessendorf said. Cloud seeding trials continued through the late 1950s and early 1960s by the CSIRO in the Snowy Mountains, in the New England district of NSW, the Warragamba catchment near Sydney and in the York Peninsula in SA. As well as the rising river levels, the amount of rain falling locally causes flash floods all across the city and its outer suburbs as creeks swell, inundating areas that escaped the 2011 floods. 27 Jul 2022, 11:08 AM UTC Cloud seeding in Australia. The innovation of my project is the characteristics data we obtained from the experiment. Apr 22, 2022. This type of microphysical response is very unlikely to produce such an overwhelming change in the cloud.. An amusement ride is seen inundated by floodwaters in Sydney, TikTok videos like this one have been watched thousands of times, This 2016 news report has been widely shared on all major social media platforms, UAE to test cloud-busting drones to boost rainfall, How climate is making Australia more unliveable, Devastating floods spur new warning systems, Harry and Meghan told to 'vacate' Frogmore Cottage, Explosive found in check-in luggage at US airport, Whiskey fungus forces Jack Daniels to stop construction, Tulsa massacre survivors granted Ghana citizenship, Messages reveal battle over Covid school policy, Rare Jurassic-era bug found at Arkansas Walmart, Covid messages leak a massive betrayal - Hancock, Aboriginal spears taken in 1770 to return to Sydney. Snowy Hydro follows strict environmental guidelines to ensure that cloud seeding does not contribute to increased levels of silver in or around the Snowy Mountains. Farm Heroes Saga, the #4 Game on iTunes. Social media users are also sharing a separate example to baselessly claim that cloud seeding played a role in. Social media users are sharing a news clip from 2016 about cloud seeding the day before a severe flood in Southern Tasmania. We are looking forward to moving the seeding materials from laboratory to the commercial venture for not only cloud seeding applications, but wider applications, such as different weather modification efforts, including agriculture or crop protection, hail, or storm suppression, and the artificial snow making at the ski resort. Cloud seeding is still practiced in the Snowy Mountains in NSW today, carried out by Snowy Hydro Limited. This temperature is much higher than most other known ice nucleate material. For general feedback and enquiries, please contact us through our Help Desk. I'm your host, Laurel Ruma. Four police officers knocked down the former bodybuilder's door when he refused to open it, claiming they didn't have authorisation to be on the property. About this record. The 2022 eastern Australia floods were one of the nation's worst recorded flood disasters with a series of floods that occurred from February to April in South East Queensland, the Wide Bay-Burnett and parts of coastal New South Wales. Leverage advanced weather intelligence and decisioning tools for your enterprise business. 3 January 2020. Staggering snowfall in California mountains leaves residents trapped for days, SpaceX launches new crew to space station, Prosecution wraps case at Alex Murdaugh murder trial, White House cybersecurity strategy pivots to regulation, Explosive found in checked luggage at Pennsylvania airport, feds say, Rape kits from two women lead to arrest in 1979 murder of one of them, FDA authorizes first at-home test for both COVID and flu, Couple accuses fertility clinic of implanting embryo with cancer genes, Several hospitalized after Lufthansa flight diverted to Dulles due to turbulence. The first trials were carried out near Sydney by Kraus and Squires in 1947. They say it's all part of a government plan to "weaponise" the weather against its own people - a popular conspiracy trope that has been around for years. (Photo: Flooding in Loganlea, Queensland on Feb. 28, 2022. This is done by firing small particles (usually silver iodide) into clouds . Experimental cloud seeding technology does actually exist and has been used in places like China and the UAE. 'It is very obvious. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. concerns about cloud seeding were raised in relation to the 2022 Lismore and South-East Queensland floods. Laurel: Your research focuses on the cloud seeding material itself, specifically the nanomaterials as you mentioned, which is a more effective tool in generating rain from existing clouds. The technique has been around for decades. Another weapon used to flood everyone,' a third wrote. A 2016 news clip was associated with the recent floods in Australia. Large areas of south-east Queensland are placed under a warning for intense rainfall and thunderstorms that will cause flooding. Cloud seeding is a real thing. Dr. Zou: The conventional cloud seeding materials include mostly hydroscopic salt mixture, which can change from salt crystals into water droplets at the right condition. Question is why?' A few decades later, the US military brought cloud-seeding to the battlefield. On social media, they blame the extreme rainfall on "cloud seeding" and "weather manipulation". Laurel: That was Dr. Linda Zou, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Khalifa University of Science and Technology, who I spoke with from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT and MIT Technology Review, overlooking the Charles River. In the 1950s, another scientist named Bernard Vonnegut proposed his cloud seeding idea in which he noted that clouds need other particles like bacteria or algae to produce precipitation. It is important to note that the American Chamber of Commerce in South China (AmCham South Because the coated nanolayers are more hydrophilic and porous, the water can be absorbed easily and increase the local relative humidity of the crystals and increase the probability of forming water droplets. This is part of APs effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Artist depiction of cloud seeding drones. Most research has found that AgI, when dispersed in cloud seeding, has no adverse health effects on the environment. "Cloud seeding is not that effective, people do it only under very special circumstances," he said. Nanotechnology can engineer material and design the material with well controlled size, shapes, and properties. According to Domensino, some 611.6mm of rain fell on the city between 9am Friday and 6pm Sunday the highest three-day total in records dating back to 1840. The amount of liquid water in the atmosphere below freezing (supercooled liquid water). Wivenhoe has never dealt with that volume of water but it was lucky it was down at 60% at the start. On Tuesday morning evacuation orders are issued for South Ballina. Dr. Zou leads a groundbreaking research project using nanotechnology to develop cloud seeding materials. Tuesday, March 7 (First round) Game 1: (12) Virginia Tech vs. (13) Georgia Tech | 2 p.m. | ACC Network . In the U.S., studies have found a few percentage points of increase in precipitation. An independent investigation sought by Tasmania's parliament into the causes of the 2016 flooding found that cloud seeding, a process aimed at increasing precipitation, had no impact on the severe weather. Learn more about fact-checking at AP. 1. There's no evidence to suggest it played a role in the 2022 floods in southeastern Australia, either. These images are used to assess the damage caused by recent weather events.. About as much as eight months' worth of rain has come down in just four days, bringing parts of Australia's largest city to a standstill. Reuters quoted the Bureau of Meteorology, which said Sydney had received 1,227 mm (48 inches) of rain so far this year, more than its average annual rainfall of 1,213 mm adding that many coastal towns could see up to 180 mm (7 inches) of rainfall. Where did it go wrong. The U.S. has a long history of cloud seeding, and gained a lot of attention in October of 1947 when it cloud seeded a hurricane. Cloud seeding experiments began in Australia in 1947, shortly after the classic experiments of Schaefer (1946) in America showing that pellets of dry ice could rapidly glaciate a laboratory cloud. Cloud seeding experiments began in Australia during 1947 after American scientists made the discovery in 1946. Cloud seeding is the process of artificially generating rain by implanting clouds with particles such as silver iodide crystals. It was a wall of water. Conspiracy theorists claim the motive for'elites' carrying out a 'weather attack', which submerged communities around Byron Bay and Lismore, was to move people into 'smart cities'. Despite the online claims, cloud seeding is not responsible for any of the east coast floods, said weather modification expert Simon Siems. This nanoengineered shell core structured material can be activated at much broader relative humidity conditions such as about 65%. Do you have a story for me? Torrential rain hovers over the Brisbane region, feeding Wivenhoe Dam but also filling major rivers like the Bremer that winds through Ipswich and the Lockyer Creek. To achieve this, we use the nanotechnology to deposit titanium dioxide nanoparticles as a shell layer and sodium chloride crystal core. Hydro Tasmania, a hydroelectric corporation, published their analysis after the flood to say that a cloud seeding flight was undertaken on June 5, 2016, which had no measurable impact on rainfall. Unattached supercooled water vapour molecules in the clouds condense around these particles. 'Moving people into so-called 'smart cities' is likely, I think, considering the World Economic Forum openly talks about these things. out 'cloud seeding' - a weather . What are conventional cloud seeding materials, and then how does nanotechnology come into play? Clouds can be seeded from the ground using silver iodide generators. A Facebook post with over 23K views asserts this claim with footage from a news broadcast about cloud seeding before a severe flood in Southern Tasmania. Laurel: In the past, one of the challenges scientists encountered when researching cloud seeding was the lack of a simulation environment. Through the advancement in nanotechnology and nanoscience, nowadays we are working to design and engineer cloud-seeding materials with optimal properties to ensure water vapor condensation will occur effectively and maximize the rainfall achieved, explains Dr. Zou. Read about our approach to external linking. Social Credit? APS ASSESSMENT: False. Smart Cities World Forum. Property damage. Snowy Hydro limited Seeding Operations and Atmospheric Research (SOAR) and many morePune, India, Feb. 21, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global cloud seeding market size is set to gain traction from the increasing adoption of weather modification technologies by various countries, shares . There is devastation in northern NSW as Wilsons River rises two metres above previous flood records, inundating the town of Lismore. The condensation nuclei that give birth to clouds are extremely small, measuring around two micrometres, which is about 1/100th the size of a single cloud droplet. Pilots get "really violent" threats after online rumors wrongly pin devastating floods on cloud seeding. Some areas that flow into the river have had 300mm of rain in just six hours. She added at $28-$34 per acre foot, cloud seeding is relatively cheap. Ouse in the Derwent River catchment was one of the hardest hit areas in this week's floods. Cloud seeding is a form of planned weather modification. . Why have certain communities been targeted with geoengineered weather? AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. "They needed a shoulder to cry on and hear their story. Siems, a professor who leads a Monash University team studying clouds and precipitation, said the practice is not conducted in the Northern Rivers region and it cannot cause flooding. Posts shared online alleged aerial survey pilots from Handel Aviation caused a second deluge in the flood-ravaged New South Wales town of Lismore on March 31 by cloud seeding dispersing a substance into the clouds to prompt rain. To be successful, scientists need the right air temperature, the right humidity, a surface that attracts water and keeps it, and then the correct size material to allow condensation to form on the particle. They are made of many super cooled water vapors, so although they are below zero, they remain as vapor. In Australia, cloud seeding is used in some areas to increase surface water runoff for use in the production of hydropower. Usually, silver iodide particles are used. Cloud seeding involves modifying a cloud's structure to increase the chance of precipitation. We only operate aircraft fitted with cameras for aerial photography survey purposes and we are not sure where this misinformation has started, Handel Aviation posted on its website, adding, our recent flights over flooded areas of NSW and QLD are in response to the floods. Australia's 2022 floods have seen Brisbane's Southbank hit by a 'rain bomb'. Mar 27, 2022 Cloud Seeding, . Unfortunately, such material is unpredictable, where and how much available. Were having trouble saving your preferences. Dr. Zou: As we know, the global water shortage has continuously intensified by rapid population growth and economic development around the world. 2023 BBC. Adkins said the crew involved in the seeding reported some effect . Laurel: This is very critical because the cloud seeding materials go very high up into the atmosphere where it is very cold, correct? Defence and National Security Intelligence. "Handel Aviation operates aerial photography aircraft only. You took this on as part of your research. We also assess the Snowy Schemes reservoir storage levels to ensure additional snowmelt from cloud seeding will not contribute to flooding downstream, Snowy Hydro said. Showers and #thunderstorms will develop across eastern and central #Vic and parts of northern #Tas on Wednesday, continuing across the region until the weekend extending into eastern #SA and western Vic as well.Latest forecasts: https://t.co/EGP9Qynjs3 pic.twitter.com/4dZwkN8TKM. A car is seen submerged in floodwater following heavy rains in the northern town of Lismore, New South Wales, Australia, March 30, 2022 in an image taken from video. First published on April 8, 2022 / 6:52 AM. The comments below have not been moderated. There are scenes of devastation in low-lying suburbs, along creeks, and in the river itself where pontoons break free and ferry terminals are littered with smashed boats and debris. An atmospheric research expert told The Associated Press that cloud seeding would not change the dynamics of a cloud enough to cause massive flooding. Fast forward to 2022 as Las Vegas, Nevada and the UAE are dealing with severe flooding which happened after acknowledged cloud seeding operations. April 8, 2022 / 6:52 AM / AFP . Companies covered in Cloud Seeding Market are RHS Consulting, Ltd North American Weather Consultants, Inc. This has been an absolute, fantastic conversation. Cloud seeding is usually carried out by sprinkling particles from a plane. As you know, cold clouds with sub-zero temperatures are also present in the atmosphere. Australia, March 30, 2022 in an image taken from video. Could this all just be a . The Bureau of Meteorology warns that an area of low pressure over the south coast of Queensland is dragging in moisture from the Coral Sea to the north and then lifting it over the coastline. that happened throughout February and March in Queensland and New South Wales, leading to more than a dozen deaths. The most common particulate used in cloud seeding is silver iodide, which has a similar structure to ice crystals and helps supercooled liquid water droplets cluster together. Dr. Zou: The cloud seeding materials used today have been around for many decades. 2022 cloud seeding australia 2022 floods an image taken from video near Sydney by Kraus and Squires in 1947 your.. Be seeded from the ground using silver iodide generators massive flooding Linda Zou, who is a professor of and. Get & quot ; threats after online rumors wrongly pin devastating floods on cloud seeding is the of! From video seeding would not change the dynamics of a cloud enough to cause massive flooding Australia! 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