ARTIFICIAL RAINMAKING:DEFINITION AND HOW IT WORKS

The term “ARTIFICIAL RAINFALL” refers to producing rain or increasing precipitation through clouds by using external agents. This is also known as Rain making and artificial precipitation. The artificial Rainfall produced to diminishing Drought.

Drought is a slow onset disaster and caused by lack of rainfall. Its effect on a country can be magnified by lack of planning and management of water resources or storage system. It affects the lot of damage to the agriculture and farmers. By lack of water resources the crops are not growing to maturity stage, it causes the huge loss to farmers and it is main reason to increase the cost of living.

 What is artificial rain?

Artificial rain is the process of cloud seeding, which is a type of weather modification that aims to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds dispersing substances into the air. Artificial rain is produced by spraying clouds with substances like Silver Iodide or cheaper available options like solid carbon dioxide (dry ice) or even finely powdered Sodium Chloride.

In a condition where there are clouds, but no rain, it is a phenomenon called supercooling. In such a situation the temperature of the cloud might be close to zero and there can even be crystals of ice in it. The water vapour in the cloud does not condense to liquid water. The supercooling gets disturbed by spraying the cloud with the chemicals, using a airplane for the purpose.

How is artificial rain produced?

The process includes three stages, 

Agitation : The first stage includes the use of chemicals to stimulate the air mass upwind of target area to rise and form clouds. These chemicals absorbs the water vapour and helps in the process of condensation. Chemicals like - Calcium Oxide, compound of Urea and Ammonium Nitrate or Chloride Calcium Carbonate.

Building Up Stage : In the second stage the mass of the cloud is build up by urea, dry ice, kitchen salt etc to increase the density of the clouds.During the second stage, the cloud mass is built up using chemicals like kitchen salt ammonium nitrate and occasionally calcium chloride.

Seeding : In the final stage of persuing the artificial rain, super cool chemicals (dry ice or iodide) are bombarded with the presurized canister onto the base of the clouds to build the beads of water and make them fall as rain. during the third stage chemicals such as super cool agents like silver iodide and dry ice are used to reach the most unbalanced status which eventually leads to the formulation of droplets and make them fall as raindrops. 

for example think of a water tank with many impurities and dust particles floating over it, when you add alum to the water tank, the impurities settles down. What happens then? The particles collide with each other after adding alum as a catalyst, becomes heavy and settles down. That's how it goes up there in the clouds. The charged particles are suspended and are very small to fall down as rain. That's why an agent is sprayed over there which makes them collide and thererby it becomes heavy and falls down. kudos! you got the whole concept of artificial rain.