Cloudbusting Means It Never Rains ... Or It Pours
By Irina Titova
Staff Writer
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Geophysics Observatory's Okunev.
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It's hardly surprising that most self-respecting St. Petersburg residents treasure their umbrellas so highly, as the city's climate has been a problem since its foundation almost 300 years ago. The main problem is precipitation: It rains in fall, drizzles in spring, snows in winter, and not even a sunny summer day is immune from a torrential downpour. Sometimes, however, the clouds can hold off for weeks. During the fortnight of the Goodwill Games in summer 1994, for example, the sun miraculously shone all the time - a rather weird, dim light, as though through some fog or shroud. And the first drop of rain from a thunderstorm hit the ground just a minute after the closing ceremony. "Yes, we worked hard at that time," said Sergei Okunev of the St. Petersburg Geophysics Observatory, one of Russia's top experts on the practicalities of cloud-seeding technology, or cloudbusting. During the Goodwill Games, Okunev said, specially equipped airplanes were kept busy making sure it didn't rain by seeding the clouds with certain chemical reagents that either induce or inhibit precipitation - in other words, to make it rain sooner or later. However, he said, cloudbusting is a far cry from the stereotypical image of North American native chiefs banging on wardrums and hollering at the sky. Today's cloudbusters use various chemical reagents, such as iodized silver, liquid nitrogen and solid carbonic acid, either individually or in combinations. "It needs really experienced meteorological experts," Okunyev said. "They have to be able to diagnose the type of cloud, its distance from the desired or undesired location, and how much reagent is needed to get the necessary effect." Attempting to control the weather is not a new phenomenon here - Soviet scientists began investigating ways to influence events in the 1930s, following an order by Joseph Stalin. The researchers tackled questions including regulating rainfall, warding off hail, dispersing fog and preventing avalanches. "There were quite a number of areas in which those technologies were in high demand," said Viktor Petrov, deputy head of Atmosphere Technologies Agency ATTECH in Moscow, naming "agriculture, aviation, traffic, hydro-electric power, forestry and city life." Even with dozens of scientists at meteorological laboratories all across what was then the Soviet Union, it took years to accumulate the necessary know-how to, for example, disperse hail-bearing clouds threatening the entire grape harvest in Moldova and Georgia, redirect rainclouds to drought-hit agricultural areas, or disperse fog from around airports or large road junctions. "It was a massive task, which required collaboration between many services, such as forecasters, and those that developed the equipment and the chemicals," said Georgy Schukin, head of the Long-Range Atmospheric Probing Scientific Center, or DPASC, a branch of the Geophysics Observatory. The DPASC, located in the village of Voyeikovo, 30 kilometers east of St. Petersburg, spent years working on developing ecologically pure, efficient and cheap reagents for the tasks at hand. Petrov said the chemicals used today are ecologically clean and don't damage the health of anyone caught up in the precipitation caused. "We use substances originating from the atmosphere itself," he said. Another aim of the research was the ability to guarantee sunny weather for large cities during official celebrations, thereby generating the required festive spirit. "The country particularly needed the service for big national celebrations like October Revolution Day, on Nov. 7, or Victory Day, on May 9, in Moscow," Petrov said. "Big sports events like the 1980 Olympic Games also needed it." In 1986, experts were scrambled to prevent rainfall within a 30-kilometer radius of the nuclear-power plant at Chernobyl, after a reactor exploded on April 26, causing massive doses of radioactive pollution in the area. "We were told not to let rainclouds reach the area to save the Pripyat River from radioactive rainfall," Petrov said. According to Okunev, the research did not always go as planned. "A long time ago, while we were still researching the technology, I had a curious experience when, instead of preventing a hailcloud from damaging a harvest, we caused even more hail to fall, due to miscalculating the amount of reagent," he said. Today, Petrov said, the cloudbusters almost never fail, although the work may be seriously complicated by atmostpheric warm fronts, which cover huge areas with rainclouds, or by the prevailing winds. "Sometimes, that's hard to explain to the client," he said. ATTECH, founded in 1999, was the first commercial cloudbusting organization in Russia. Since then, it has been contracted to work in places as diverse as Uzbekistan, Siberia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Italy, Syria and Portugal. "Uzbekistan calls us twice a year to provide a clean sky for their big celebrations in Tashkent on March 21 and in September," Petrov said. However, the process is expensive: Leasing an airplane can cost from $200 to $800 per hour, depending on the craft's class; fuel adds some $320 per hour; while the experts' time and airport taxes also increase the price. "Two days of meteorological defense of Moscow costs 10 million rubles [$322,000]," Petrov said. However, with St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary looming like a stormcloud on the horizon in May, Petrov said that no orders regarding the weather have, as yet, been placed by the City Administration or anyone else. "Of couse, we would get a team together to help the city," he said. "But nobody's asked us yet." Or could it just be that the city wants to sell more umbrellas?
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