Who’ll Stop the Rain? China to Open Chemical Umbrella Over Beijing for Olympics

Everybody talks about the weather, as Mark Twain famously observed, but the Chinese are actually doing something about it.

Chinese meteorologists are working on a scheme to guarantee clear skies for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8, even though summer is the rainy season and August 8 usually carries a 50 percent chance of rain.

Basically, the Chinese have figured out a way to reverse the process that meteorologists around the world use to encourage rain to fall—seeding clouds with silver iodide, salts and dry ice to form larger raindrops and create a downpour. Chinese meteorologists will use a similar technique to reduce the size of raindrops and prevent them from falling, creating a temporary umbrella over the stadium until the clouds have drifted away. That’s assuming it works.

"If you're talking about a small rainfall, you can eliminate it," said Wang Yubin, deputy chief engineer of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau. "But if it's going to be raining cats and dogs, there's nothing man can do about it."

The reason for this experiment in weather modification is that the $400 million, 91,000-seat stadium China built for the Olympic Games has no roof. Nicknamed the “bird’s nest,” the stadium is open to the sky, except for a network of interlacing steel beams.

Memo to China: Next time you need to keep something dry, put a lid on it.
_{Photo courtesy of Wally Irwin}

More information:

• China plans to halt rain for Beijing Olympics—Los Angeles Times
• Beijing has some success with rain prevention-official—Reuters