CLOUD FORMATION AND ATMOSPHERIC RAIN MAKING DUE TO PLASMA LASER AND UV RADIATION

Long Description

Rain plays an important role in the world economy by influencing the agriculture yield. But rain is a natural phenomenon, and it does not fall as and when a man needs it. Researchers are trying to create artificial rain for the past many years. At present, the seeding process is used of artificial rain fall. The chemicals such as silver iodide, calcium chloride or sodium chloride are used as seed. Chemicals are spread from the aircraft in the cloud region. Nucleation starts on these chemicals, which leads to the precipitation and then rain. This process has been tried in South Africa, Thailand, Japan, Mexico, Brazil and some parts of India. This process is not reliable and fails many times. Besides, it is harmful to mankind because sprayed chemicals come to the earth along with the rain. It is, also, quite expensive. In this Proposal, a non-polluting, economical and more reliable method is proposed. The plasma laser pulse is used to trigger the rainfall and this can be applied to warm white clouds also.

The laser has not, so far, been applied to create artificial rain. Only recently, ¹Rohwetter et al. (2010) have shown that self-guided ionized filaments generated by ultrashort laser pulses are able to induce water-cloud condensation in the free, sub-saturated atmosphere in the altitude region between 45 and 75 m. In this method, a high power pulse laser creates a bunch of filaments (low resistance path) between lightning cloud and the earth.