Cloud seeding to enhance rainfall has had a chequered career in Australia. Starting here with all the surplus aircraft and crews after WWII many missions were flown over various catchments. I get an impression there was a turf war between the BoM and CSIRO and the statistics of rainfall make cloud seeding results often hard to assess and there is always some NIMBY whining that it was too wet or too dry. I mentioned CS in a blog 2 years ago see links and maps there. I have been aware that Snowy Hydro has carried out CS trials against Greens opposition and checked their www pages. Seems the CS trials are still going so I grabbed the 2016 report. Nothing about actual rain results so I checked the NSW rain anomalies for max term of 4 years. Presto the best anomaly in NSW is where do you think?
Maybe we should be getting on with extending CS into other alpine areas where we can value add the Murray River and other Vic & NSW dam catchments. BTW the previous 4 year period ending Dec 2013 had a good result too.
I remember decades ago, cloud seeding trials in WA. Have you seen any results from that? They were over some Central Wheatbelt areas I believe.
I checked Wikileaks, it talks about a lot of other trials, but nothing for WA: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
Yes Tom I have been reading up any Australian cloud seeding reports I can find for over ten years now. Here are a few links that I hope still work.
www.warwickhughes.com/water/seed.html
www.warwickhughes.com/sydwater/sydrain.htm
www.warwickhughes.com/sydwater/nsw4774.gif
Tassie Hydro has used CS for many years but in June 2016 they flew a mission after a forecast of heavy rain – there were floods – CS was attacked and they have stopped CS now. So that leaves Snowy Hydro as the last CS project
www.hydro.com.au/search?indexCatalogue=basic-search&searchQuery=cloud%20seeding&wordsMode=AllWords
CS has few friends and always has many Green and NIMBY enemies, people worried about too much rain or too little.
The Perth region and catchments seem an obvious place to mount say a 5 year CS project but I see little chance of that.
I can scour my old HDD’s and see what I can find to post online.
I doubt cloud seeding would have much effect in SW WA as humidity levels low in the summer and we rarely see the high convective clouds where seeding might work.
Cloud seeding trials were conducted in the Chapman Valley
near Geraldton in the 50’s or 60’s and apparently little more than throwing dry ice from a Tiger Moth and the Government Departments running them were not what we now call “high tech”.
I never cease to be amazed how people with little or no expertise in this area could suddenly graduate to becoming experts, but it seems two weeks training was more than
enough training to qualify them as experts and declare cloud seeding was a failure.
In around 2000 I arranged for a group of professional cloud seeders to visit Perth for a series of lectures at various venues in and around Perth.
The team included the owner of a hi-tech cloudseeding group from the USA, together with two very distinguished atmospheric scientists with high global reputations.
We issued free invitations to all Government Departments and their scientific staff.
There was considerable favourable coverage by the media at the time but shortly after we were advised that all scientific personell from Department of Agriculture, CSIRO, Department of Water and the Water Corporation.
There were 4 sessions held, one in Perth, two at Curtin Uni and one in Bunbury all of which were well attended and informative for the public audiences.
Co-incidentally the one in Perth attracted two of the people who participated in the Chapman Valley trials.
After they had listened to the 4 speakers, they joined them and when asked what they though, they said it was very disappointing that the agency people boycotted the meeting and therefore learnt nothing, whereas the farmers, country people and country towns had learnt plenty.
Our Government Departments and their staff believe they have the wisdom of Solomon on any issue because they thought the learned at University 10 years before.
I have news for them because on the drive down to Bunbury in light rain and huge black clouds, they revealed that those clouds would never rain and went further by saying they had
never been to Perth but it was their belief that our industrial area was to our right and asked me to take them to the area.
Sure enough on arrival, they saw all the industry along the coastal strip between Fremantle and Rockingham.
The atmospheric scientists nominated which factories were producing what and they could tell that from seeing their emissions from the smokestacks, then said they had changed all the smokestacks and diffusers on their plants and as a result the ice seed particles going into the atmosphere were to small to attract ice, then when heavy enough fell to the ground as
rain.
They cited many examples of the work they had done around the world and proved lack of rainfall was usually a result of over zealous rules and regulations by respective EPA’S.
In the presentation in Bunbury (packed house) the farmers could’nt understand why we were continually told it had stopped raining in WA.
Most farmers kept accurate rainfall measurements for their properties, some of these records were 50 years old and they had not seen any decline in the rain.
They were told that unlike the coastal strip we saw earlier the strip from Mandurah to Bunbury and beyond did not have any polluting industry between the coast and their farms and
as a consequence when we had a storm along the coast, the waves crashing on shore sent perfectly sized ice particles into the atmosphere which became rain.
In a trip to Wellington Dam they pointed out the perfect clouds for seeding and the rainfall which could be expected.
Back in Perth they offered to do actual trial but were refused saying it was all hocus pocus.
There are none so blind as those who cannot(or don’t want to see) the naysayers out their that Tasmania has had a cloud seeing program running for 20 years, with results over that time proving that expenditure of $1.5m pa. resulted in an average of $7.5. a year of free water.
The Snowy Mountains Hydro Authority also use cloudseeding to increase rainfall and hence more hydro-electric power.
Waterguru