This news has been way under the radar. This observation from Climate Home News:
Geoengineering, or manipulating the weather, is one of the most contentious topics in the fight against climate change. So it’s a bit of a jaw-dropper that China is carrying out a large-scale experiment to boost rainfall over the Tibetan plateau, with no apparent international oversight. The system involves a network of cloud-seeding burners over an area three times the size of Spain.
A map of of the Tibetan Plateau. Note that several really important and fundamentally “life-giving” rivers are sourced in the Plateau:
Excerpt:
China is testing cutting-edge defence 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, 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 – according to researchers involved in the project.
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), or three times the size of Spain. It will be the world’s biggest such project.
The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent with a crystalline structure much like ice. The chambers stand on steep mountain ridges facing the moist monsoon from south Asia. As wind hits the mountain, it produces an upward draft and sweeps the particles into the clouds to induce rain and snow.
Each of the chambers looks like this:
“[So far,] more than 500 burners have been deployed on alpine slopes in Tibet, Xinjiang and other areas for experimental use. The data we have collected show very promising results,” a researcher working on the system told the South China Morning Post.
The ground-based network will also employ other cloud-seeding methods using planes, drones and artillery to maximise the effect of the weather modification system.
The ground-based network also comes at a relatively low price – each burning unit costs about 50,000 yuan (US$8,000) to build and install. Costs are likely to drop further due to mass production.
This infographic gives us a rough idea how it works:
