Weather Manipulation and KCR’s ‘Foreign Hand behind Cloudburst’

Recent news reports state that Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao on Sunday, July 17, 2022, said that he has information that there may be a suspected “foreign hand” behind the cloudbursts in some parts of the country. 

The Wire quoted the CM as saying “A new method called cloudburst has come. They say there are conspiracies around it. We don’t know how far it is true. Some foreign countries are deliberately doing cloudbursts in our country. Earlier, they did it in Leh (Ladakh). Later, they did it in Uttarakhand. We have received ‘gloomy, gloomy’ information that they are doing in the Godavari basin also. Whatever it is due to changes in climate these kinds of calamities occur. So, we need to safeguard our people, including the Godavari river basin which is in spate in the state.” Heavy rains had lashed Telangana for about seven days, prior to the CM’s visit, causing inundation of low-lying areas across the state and damage to agricultural crops and others. 

Rao was speaking to reporters after visiting the flood-hit Bhadrachalam town in Bhadradri-Kothagudem district when he made the statement. News reports say that reactions have been pouring in ever since he made the statement with a politician also describing it as the “joke of the century.”

We also came across many explainer articles as well as fact checks on the Minister’s “conspiracy theory” comment on cloudbursts. 

After Rao’s quote went viral, Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan clarified that the recent heavy rains could not be classified as cloudburst. She explained that the flooding is a result of the Godavari river overflowing due to heavy rainfall in some of the adjacent states and also attributed it to inflows from upstream. 

WHAT IS A CLOUDBURST AND WHAT IS NOT?

Many link the term ‘Cloudburst’ with some ‘bursting’ or ‘explosion’ but actually, it is nothing but extreme amount of rainfall in a short period over a comparatively smaller area. Cloudbursts take place when an extreme amount of precipitation occurs in a short period of time within a small geographical area. 

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) defines it as ‘unexpected precipitation exceeding 100mm (10cm) per hour over a geographical region of approximately 20 to 30 square km’. 

This points to the fact that all instances of heavy rainfall might not come under the category of ‘cloudburst’ if it does not fit in with the definition mentioned above. At the same time, the fact holds true that a particularly heavy-rainfall event that might not get counted as a ‘cloudburst’ might be quite catastrophic. You can read more about Cloudbursts here. 

RECENT ALLEGATIONS OF WEATHER MANIPULATION

We noticed that Rao isn’t the only one to have had such doubts. A news report from earlier this month, stated that unfounded allegations of “weather manipulation” had spread widely after Sydney, Australia, was hit by the third wave of major floods this year. Scientists had blamed the intense rainfall on a combination of factors after about as much as eight months’ worth of rain was recorded in just four days. Despite experts denying it, all conspiracy theorists have been blaming extreme rainfall on “cloud seeding” and “weather manipulation”. 

WEATHER MANIPULATION

The Britannica website defines weather modification as ‘the deliberate or the inadvertent alteration of atmospheric conditions by human activity, sufficient to modify the weather on local or regional scales.’

CLOUD SEEDING

Cloud seeding is defined by the Britannica website as “deliberate introduction into clouds of various substances that act as condensation nuclei or ice nuclei in an attempt to induce precipitation. Although the practice has many advocates, including national, state, and provincial government officials, some meteorologists and atmospheric scientists question its effectiveness.” 

The effectiveness of cloud seeding, patented in 1948, is still a matter of debate as it has been observed that under certain meteorological conditions precipitation increases while a decrease is recorded in some instances. Under some conditions, however, seeding has no effect at all.

ARE RAINS REALLY BEING ARTIFICIALLY CREATED?

As temperatures shot above 50°C in July 2021, UAE’s National Center of Meteorology created rain using cloud seeding technology to get a respite from the heat. The nation was introduced to this technology in the late 1990s.

A news report from 2016 states that China had set aside $30 million for a controversial project designed to make it rain by shooting clouds with special bullets. The project was part of a larger campaign of so-called weather modification techniques that the country has been using since at least 2008, when they claim to have cleared the skies for the Beijing Olympics by forcing the rain to come early, reportedly. 

Even in India, Maharashtra had undertaken a very expensive cloud-seeding program over three months and across 100 square miles in the state, reeling under drought after drought, in the summer of 2015. The then State Minister of Revenue, Eknath Khadse had stated “There is no other technology available in the world to bring more rains. We must be willing to try it.”

A news report, published in the New York Times newspaper in 1972 states that The United States had been secretly seeding clouds over North Vietnam, Laos and South Vietnam to increase and control the rainfall for military purposes. It also quotes a Nixon Administration official who said he believed the first use of weather modification over North Vietnam took place in late 1968 or early 1969 when rain was increased in an attempt to hamper the ability of anti-aircraft missiles to hit American Jets.  

We also came across a memorandum From the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (Kohler) to Secretary of State Rusk, sent in 1967 that has more details about Project Popeye- weather modification in North Vietnam and Laos. 

A wide variety of scientific tests and operational weather modification projects have been performed in many countries. Though a few governments have been trying it out on their own, most have opted for coordination with a private company. It is said that Weather Modification Incorporated, is the largest such company and it claims that its technology works. It is the same company that had been roped in by Maharashtra for the cloud seeding project.