Boffin's rain dance

[Outlaw Yogi]

Have scientists discovered how to create downpours in the desert?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... esert.html

They have been using giant ionisers, shaped like stripped down lampshades on steel poles, to generate fields of negatively charged particles.

These promote cloud formation and researchers hoped they could then produce rain.

In a confidential company video, the founder of the Swiss company in charge of the project, Metro Systems International, boasted of success.

Helmut Fluhrer said: 'We have achieved a number of rainfalls.'

It is believed to be the first time the system has produced rain from clear skies, according to the Sunday Times.

[boxy]

If they're actually going to get this type of technology working, they're going to have to regulate it's use. You can only make it rain out of humid skies. And to take that water vapour out of the system early (which is essentially, all they're doing) deprives others of their natural rainfall. It should only be allowed to be used in areas where the prevailing/rainbearing winds take the clouds out to sea, if they don't produce.

[J.W. Frogen]

In the US Southwest during the 1950s they seeded clouds with Navajo medicine men, dropping them from planes without parachutes.

I never read if it worked or not?

[Outlaw Yogi]

Apparently the critical humidity threshold is 30% for this mechanism to work.
I've got plans/diagrams and photos in a mag showing humidity condenser structures which I reason should work, and the closer to the coast the better it should work.
Rather than build it like in the photos, as a domed tower around a narrower tower, then have people wonder what it is and possibly sneak in for a peak, I want to build it in the shape of a pyramid so they think/say "What a wierdo" and stay away. I'm a bit dismissive of the 5 gallons a day claim, but i'd like to have a go anyway.

Years ago on ABC I saw a programe where rich Arabs hired westerners to build a dew collector.
They put up a framework strung with non absorbent fabric (probably like modern boat sail material) over metal guttering, and store the water in a hollowed out mountain (to prevent evaporation) in a part of desert where it literally never rains.
They managed to turn desert green with small crops and a golf course.

Don't know if you could regulate any form of humidity condensing mechanism/aparatus.
At the other end of the spectrum, how could we tell China they must stop spraying substances into clouds designed to prevent rain? They'd just tell us to mind our own business.

Several years back NSW govt was considering funding cloud seeding trials, and a Greens MP (Ian Cohen I think) condemded the idea on the grounds we shouldn't mess with nature and it'd cause extra erosion in national parks.
I got up him via email advising him to research the topic before shooting his mouth off in parliment.
An email debate developed, but when I wrote that we've already messed with nature and induced more drought conditions, so we need to find ways to mitigate our situation, so if governments don't fund cloud seeding then mega-corp water companies will, and then they'll try laying claim to ownership of the rain in the same manner GE bio-tech companies are laying claim to life forms. He thanked me for the insight.