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Read full storySunshine on a cloudy day in Moscow?
Published 23 October, 2009, 12:29
Edited 23 October, 2009, 19:31
Ambitious Moscow scientists have tested a device to battle bad weather in the Russian capital, in order to keep the city moving through the winter.
The experiment took place in downtown Moscow street of Arbat. Scientists targeted the clouds with a stream of ions, using a device similar to an air ionizer invented by Soviet scientist Aleksandr Chizhevsky.
The stream of ions was expected to lift clouds to the upper layers of the atmosphere, where they supposedly disperse due to a temperature change.
Scientists expected the sky to clear up over an area of about five square km (2 square miles), two or three hours after the experiment.
The sky over the test zone cleared up slightly at first, but after the device was switched off it started raining, according to eyewitness reports.
The scientists leading the experiment say this only proves the efficiency of the device. “You see, we turned it off, and the rain started,” said one of them.
Moscow meteorology service however didn’t notice any effect.
“The weather developed the way we expected it to. The rain stopping was a natural process,” a spokesperson for the service commented. She refrained from discussing the effect of the ionizer however, saying there was not enough data to do it.
Air ion counter Sapphire 3M
“Strictly speaking, it wasn’t an experiment in the scientific sense of the word,” claimed Deputy Head of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics Aleksandr Ginzburg, who watched the machine at work, dismissing the news. “The physical part of the experiment certainly has grounds. Aerial ions may affect the process of rainfall, but the problem here is scale.”
“They may have created something unique, but it’s difficult to judge, since they didn’t provide any quantitative parameters. There was no model description, no specifications provided in advance, so there was nothing to compare results of the test against”
The scientific community was skeptical even before the test, mainly concerning the power output of the device, which is equal to that of an electric kettle.
The scientists leading the experiment say this only proves the efficiency of the device. “You see, we turned it off, and the rain started,” said one of them.
“Weather phenomena in the atmosphere, [such as] turbulence, cyclones and anticyclones, are extremely powerful. I wonder how a small device can influence it,” said Lyudmila Krasnokutskaya of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics within the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“What can two kilowatts do to winds, clouds, million tons of water and powerful air currents in the atmosphere? It is unrealistic simply due to energy factors,” said Viktor Savrin, deputy chief of the Research Institute for Nuclear Physics at Moscow State University.
Weather control has become a hot topic in Moscow recently, after Mayor Yury Luzhkov announced plans to seed snow clouds in wintertime to save the municipal budget money spent on cleaning streets.
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