Weather modification
A popular belief in Northern Europe was that shooting prevents hail, which thus caused many agricultural towns to fire cannons without ammunition.
[3][circular reference] In January 2011, several newspapers and magazines, including the UK's Sunday Times and Arabian Business, reported that scientists backed by the government of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, had created over 50 artificial rainstorms between July and August 2010 near Al Ain, a city which lies close to the country's border with Oman and is the second-largest city in the Abu Dhabi Emirate.
During that time, under the supervision of the United States Air Force, attempts were made to create snowstorms and seed hurricanes by using silver iodide.
"In the city of Jeddah in Western Saudi Arabia was damaged by floods in 2009 that reportedly killed more than 100 people; igniting questions of why the country doesn't have effective drainage systems in place.
[12]Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft into storms and seeding the eyewall with silver iodide.
[13] Alexandre Chorin of the University of California, Berkeley, proposed dropping large amounts of environmentally friendly oils on the sea surface to prevent droplet formation.
[15] The Florida company Dyn-O-Mat and its CEO, Peter Cordani, proposed the use of a patented product it developed, called Dyn-O-Gel, to reduce the strength of hurricanes.
The substance is a polymer in powder form (a polyacrylic acid derivative) which reportedly has the ability to absorb 1,500 times its own weight in water.
Peter Cordani teamed up with Mark Daniels and Victor Miller, the owners of a government contracting aviation firm AeroGroup which operated ex-military aircraft commercially.
The tests were documented on film and made international news showing the storms were successfully removed on monitored Doppler radar.
If enough power were to be used then it may be enough, combined with computer modelling, to form an interference pattern able to inhibit a hurricane or significantly reduce its strength by depriving it of heat energy.
[22][23] Other proposals for hurricane modification include the construction of a large array of offshore wind turbines along the East Coast of the United States.
Such turbines would have the dual purpose of generating plentiful energy whilst also reducing the power of oncoming hurricanes before they make landfall.
The Convention was signed in Geneva on May 18, 1977; entered into force on October 5, 1978; ratified by U.S. President Jimmy Carter on December 13, 1979; and the U.S. ratification deposited in New York on January 17, 1980.
[35] In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps records of weather modification projects on behalf of the Secretary of Commerce, under the authority of Public Law 92-205, 15 USC § 330B, enacted in 1971.
This bill bans the "intentional injection, release, or dispersion" of chemicals within Tennessee "with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.
In ancient India, it is said that yajna or Vedic rituals of chanting mantras and offerings were performed by rishis to bring sudden bursts of rainfall in rain starved regions.
In Greek mythology, Iphigenia was offered as a human sacrifice to appease the wrath of the goddess Artemis, who had becalmed the Achaean fleet at Aulis at the beginning of the Trojan War.
[48] It is further recorded that the ensuing drought lasted for a period of 3.5 years at which time Elijah called the rains to come again and the land was restored.
This was adapted into a movie where Flint Lockwood, the town's outcast and scientist, has created a machine that converts water from the clouds into food.
In the Star Trek franchise, the United Federation of Planets has weather modification technology, in addition to terraforming capabilities.
