Scientists charge clouds with electricity to cause rain

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), with its harsh desert climate and average rainfall of just 10 cm a year, needs more fresh water. In search of a solution to this problem, they are funding scientific projects from around the world to make it rain.

One such project involves using catapults to launch small unmanned planes that electrically charge clouds.

A team of scientists from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom proposed the idea in 2017. Now the bespoke drones will soon begin testing near Dubai.

The idea is that charging water droplets in clouds will increase the likelihood that they will fall as rain.

“There has been a lot of speculation about what charging could do to cloud droplets, but there has been very little practical and detailed research,” says Carey Nicholl, one of the project’s principal investigators. The goal of the project is to determine whether the technology can increase rainfall in water-stressed regions.

Nicholl’s team began by modeling cloud behavior. They found that when cloud droplets have a positive or negative electrical charge, smaller droplets are more likely to merge and grow into larger raindrops.

The size of raindrops is important, Nicholl says, because in places like the UAE, where cloud cover is high and temperatures are high, droplets often evaporate as they fall.

“We’re trying to make the droplets inside the clouds big enough that when they fall out of the cloud, they will reach the ground surface,” Nicholl says.

The proposal was selected for a $1.5 million grant distributed over three years through the UAE Rain Enhancement Science Research Program, an initiative run by the National Center for Meteorology.

To test the model, Nicholl and her team built four aircraft with a two-meter wingspan. They launch from a catapult, are equipped with a full autopilot system and can fly for about 40 minutes.

Each aircraft is equipped with temperature, charge and humidity sensors, as well as charge emitters, which were developed with the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

So far, tests have been conducted in the UK and Finland, and ground measurements of cloud properties have been conducted in the UAE. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology.

Since Nicholl’s team was unable to fly to the UAE because of the pandemic, they trained operators from the flight school in Dubai to use their aircraft. Now they are waiting for the right weather conditions to complete the tests.

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