Cloud Seeding: Maharashtra Government Plans To Play God With Rains

As northern parts of Maharashtra face water scarcity, the state government is mulling “cloud seeding” for the agriculture-dependent region in August.

Cloud seeding is an artificial way of inducing moisture into clouds to cause rainfall. Chemicals like silver iodide and calcium chloride are loaded onto flares that are stacked on aircraft. The aircrafts are then flown through moisture-bearing clouds.

But its effectiveness depends on many factors. “Some of the published literature show rain enhancement of 5-10 percent, which is pertaining to a small area,” Thara Prabhakaran, project director of Cloud Aerosol Interaction and Precipitation Enhancement Experiment at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told BloombergQuint. For a large area, changes are expected to be much less, she said. “This means that proper planning at the local level along with consistent observations is necessary to determine the success rate of the experiment.”

The state government will monitor rainfall during the monsoon months of June and July before it takes a call on conducting the experiment this year.

But this is not the first time that such an attempt is being made. The rain enhancement experiment was carried out in the state in 2015.

The state cabinet, according to a PTI report, has earmarked Rs 30 crore for cloud seeding in the worst-affected regions of Vidarbha and Marathwada this year.

Bangalore-based Kyathi Climate Modification Consultants, which won the tender for this year's operation, had conducted cloud seeding in the state in 2015. “The whole monsoon we'll be operating whenever there are rain-bearing clouds,” its Chairman Prakash Koliwad said, adding that they will be deploying one aircraft and one radar in Maharashtra this year.

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