HANOI, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) — A project on a new kind of cloud seeding or rain making will be conducted on a trial basis in central Vietnam next month.
An Sinh Xanh Science and Technology Company in the central city of Da Nang has proposed the Vietnamese government allocate 5,000 billion Vietnamese dong (224 million U.S. dollars) to the local firm so that it can buy vessels and aircraft to actively make rain to deal with drought or prevent flooding, daily newspaper Tien Phong (Pioneer) reported on Friday.
The firm's general director Phan Dinh Phuong said that vessels will pump seawater to pipes fixed at the height of some 5 km by helicopters or balloons. The pipes will discharge the water to most cloudy areas over the sea. Heavier clouds will result in rain in the sea, so that downpour will not cause flooding in urban areas.
Phuong said 100 stations with the presence of vessels and aircraft should be placed in the Beibu Gulf. Relevant ministries and sectors will discuss the trial implementation of such an artificial rain project in Da Nang in October, he noted.
The local firm, which has produced many safety and energy-saving equipment, believed that the project will be 100 percent successful, because relevant principles of physics and chemistry have been applied successfully to eject water jets at Rong Bridge in Da Nang. The Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology has stated that the firm's project is feasible.
According to Phuong, his company will also use domestically-produced chemical compounds to spray over mountain tops to make rain. The made-in-Vietnam chemicals are much cheaper than foreign counterparts, he said.
Cloud seeding, a form of weather modification, is the attempt to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds, by dispersing substances into the air that serve as cloud condensation or ice nuclei, which alter the microphysical processes within the cloud. In the world, the most common chemicals used for cloud seeding include silver iodide, potassium iodide and dry ice or solid carbon dioxide.
