German Scientists Develop Laser Lowering Rain

GERMANY - A laser was used to produce a cloud in the sky that gave way to rain when needed.

For decades people are usually doing experiments seed rain by spraying the silver salt crystals into clouds high in the atmosphere.

Crystal water and push the point will come down to earth as rain.

"The efficiency of the technique is very controversial," said Jerome Kasparian of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, one of the team members who think laser could be a good way trigger rain on demand.

Kasparian and his colleagues have reported the first success of the technique is to invite a cloud in the air, both in the laboratory and in the sky Berlin Germany.

In the lab, the team fired infrared laser beam surprises extreme short into a door water-saturated air at a temperature of minus 24 degrees Celsius.

Linear cloud formations can be seen from the laser like a miniature aircraft being shaken.

Kasparian says the laser shock causes clouds to strip electrons from the atoms in the air and cause hidroxyl radical formation. It will turn into sulfur and nitrogen dioxide in the air into particles act as seeds fall of the rain.

"Each laser shock force issued a package milijoule 220 in just 60 femtoseconds, an intensity equal to the power of 1000 power plant," said Kasparian.

Analysis of air after the laser is turned off indicates that the total volume of condensed water droplets in it has increased by half, and thus the volume of condensed water increased by 100-fold.

Nevertheless, the extreme conditions of high humidity at low temperatures as in the lab is not the same as that seen in the atmosphere, according to Daniel Rosenfeld, an atmospheric scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

"Anything that has been documented in experiments with minimal relevance to natural clouds," he said.