Amazing! Scientists Zap Clouds With Electricity in Order to Create Rain

With an unfavorable, desert climate and a normal rainfall of just four inches - 10 cm - a year, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is in need of more freshwater. In the process of seeking solutions, It has been sponsoring science projects from all over the world to try to make it rain.

(Photo : Getty Images)

Lauching of the Small Umanned Aircraft

One of these projects has to do with the use of catapults to launch the not too big unmanned aircraft which zap clouds with an electric charge. A team of experts from the University of Reading, in the UK, initially suggested the idea in 2017. Now, drones that are custom-built will begin tests close to Dubai in no time.

The idea is that charging droplets in clouds will give them more likeliness to fall as rain. Keri Nicoll, one of the main investigators on the project said: "There's been so much speculation about the result of the charge on cloud droplets, but there's been few practical and comprehensive investigations." The goal is to determine if the technology can boost the rate of rainfall in water-stressed areas.

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Modelling the Behavior of Clouds 

Nicoll and her team started by altering the behavior of clouds. They discovered that when cloud droplets have either a positive or negative electrical charge, there is more possibility of the smaller droplets to merge and develop to become big raindrops. Nicoll says the size of the raindrops is crucial because, in places like the UAE which have high clouds and temperatures, droplets usually evaporate as they fall.

"What we are attempting to do is to make the droplets at the interior of the clouds big enough so that when they fall out of the cloud, they pull through down to the surface," says Nicoll. The proposal was selected to receive a grant of $1.5 million distributed over three years by the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science, an initiative controlled by the National Center of Meteorology.

(Photo : Getty Images)

Finalizing the Tests

In order to test out the model, Nicoll and her team constructed four aircraft possessing a wingspan of two meters. These are being launched from a catapult, have a complete autopilot system, and have the ability to fly for about 40 minutes. Each aircraft possesses sensors for measuring charge, temperature, humidity, and also charge emitters - the part that does the zapping - that were made with the University of Bath in the UK.

So far, testing has been carried out in the Finland and UK, and land-based measurements of cloud properties taken in the UAE. The publication of the research has been made in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology. Because the pandemic implies Nicoll's team couldn't journey to the UAE, they have drilled operators from a flight school in Dubai to make use of their aircraft. They're now waiting for suitable weather conditions to fanalize the tests. 

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