Geneva team sweeps skies for rain-on-demand breakthrough

Geneva team sweeps skies for rain-on-demand breakthrough

A high-power, ultrashort laser (red beam on the image) ionises air and triggers the condensation of water droplets in a simulation chamber. The resulting cloud is illuminated by a second, green laser, superposed with the first laser beam. ©2010, Jean-Pierre Wolf / University of Geneva

Update 14:40 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Rain on demand might not sound like something you want today, if you’ve just lived through Switzerland’s watery weekend, but a team at the University of Geneva is working on exactly this, a feature story in Nature magazine’s web site 3 May reports. Optical physicist Jérôme Kasparian at the University of Geneva and a team have been developing technology that uses lasers to create water droplets, which could someday lead to the ability to trigger rain.

First critiques of the technology praise it as having “breakthrough” potential, although the research is at an early stage.

Seeding clouds with silver iodide has been the main method of trying to make rain since the middle of the 20th century, but there are doubts about its efficacy.

Nature describes Kasparian’s work: “Firing a laser beam made up of short pulses into the air ionizes nitrogen and oxygen molecules around the beam to create a plasma, resulting in a ‘plasma channel’ of ionized molecules.” These ionized molecules “could act as natural condensation nuclei,” Kasparian has explained.

http://genevalunch.com/blog/2010/05/03/geneva-team-sweeps-skies-for-rain-on-demand-breakthrough/#more-41295

Jimmy Carter signed it in our nuke treaty, as long as we never used it to harm another nation...but what about us? I don't trush those that have this technology.

while all the rest of us will be suffering from drought. That way they will be able to control and sell every last drop.