China alters ecosystem, modifies weather to bring more rain

Oredola Adeola with agency reports

China has intensified plan to alter the ecosystem through test of the country’s cutting-edge defence technology which would modify the system thereby bringing more rain to the Tibetan plateau.

This project is being handled by the Beijing weather modification office.

Recall that last year, the Chinese Government approved a $168 million ( 1.15 billion yuan) for the project, potentially to bring more rain and snow across Beijing, and its surrounding areas including parts of Hebei and Inner Mongolia.

The Beijing Weather Modification Office operates as a unit of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau. This is expected to emerge as the world’s biggest weather alteration project.

The unit plans to use its new technology to develop a powerful yet relatively low-cost weather modification system to bring substantially more rain to the Tibetan plateau, Asia’s biggest freshwater reserve.

The system, which involves an enormous network of fuel-burning chambers installed high up on the Tibetan mountains.

According to researchers working on the project, the system could increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic metres a year ( about 7 per cent of China’s total water consumption).

The reports of the researchers shows that tens of thousands of chambers will be built at selected locations across the Tibetan plateau to produce rainfall over a total area of about 1.6 million square kilometres (620,000 square miles).

Disclosing how it intends to achieve expected results, the meteorological unit revealed that the chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent with a crystalline structure much like ice.

It further stated that the chambers stand on steep mountain ridges facing the moist monsoon from south Asia, adding that as the wind hits the mountain, it will produce an upward draft and sweeps the particles into the clouds that would later induce rain and snow.

The project is part of a larger campaign of so-called weather modification techniques that the country has been using since at least 2008, when it cleared the skies for the Beijing Olympics by forcing the rain to come early.

According to the World Meteorological Organization. apart from China that has been trying several attempts to bring down the rain since 2008, more than 52 other countries including the United States,  have current weather modification programs.

Further investigation shows that Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have been negative affected  due to interference by China in the natural ecosystem in Tibet.