Luke says, "My dad works in Beijing and has been back and forth to China since the early 80's. I sent him the link to your cloud-seeding post this week, and he replied:"
Every year Xinhua news agency, the "official" Chinese news agency, publishes one or two stories of how it has been succesfully used to end drought in one place or another in China and earlier this year, when it was used in a place called Ningxia on the borders of the Gobi desert, the report also included photographs of the hardware, not planes as in Kansas but rocket launchers mounted on the back of lorries. If this technique were being used there would be no mystery and I would have expected to see news reports but perhaps here in Beijing it is so common that it is no longer news.
However, what surprised me was his boss saying that rain is unusual in Beijing in the summer. Textbooks, meteorological records and my experience all tell me that North China, including Beijing, has a monsoon climate a bit like India's with July and August the peak months for rainfall and almost no precipitation in the winter. Having said that, I would say that in my experience, it was unusual to have rain day after day as we have known at times over the last week or so.
What I remember from my previous times in China was a few days of muggy oppressive weather building up to a heavy rainstorm that could last all day followed by some days of fine, relatively pleasant weather before starting the build-up to another heavy rain storm. But then, this year we have also had day times with occasional showers, again not like the summers I recall from when I was young, so perhaps, mirabile dictu, this is just a wet summer, unlike the dry ones with below average rainfall that
has been the pattern of recent years. And, according to meteorological records, that also is a tendency here in north China, occasional wet summers 'balancing' the drier summers we usually get.
Previously:
Cloud Seeding in Beijing? Weathermods and chem-rockets.
