Chinese Preparations for Hosting the 2008 Olympics

While China is submersed in political and security preparations for the upcoming summer Olympic Games, there is another step they are taking to ensure success. While it may seemed like a far fetched science fiction idea, the Chinese government is taking steps to make sure it does not rain over Beijing during the games.

Control the weather? This has to be some crazy propaganda scheme to attract an audience to the games. But it is not. Chinese scientists have been working on ways to ensure clear skies over Beijing during the games. The idea is to make clouds rain themselves out miles away from Beijing, ensuring the weather over the stadium will be ideal for competitors and spectators alike. In order to make a cloud rain, the Chinese are using a complicated process called cloud seeding. Using rockets and airplanes, approaching clouds will be "seeded" to make them rain out all of their moisture.

How does this seeding process work? The seeding is done to enhance natural precipitation cycles to speed up the entire process. As moisture in the air in the form of vapor rises, it begins to cool and condense into water droplets. However, there needs to be a surface to condense onto. This surface is called a Cloud Condensation Nucleus (CCN). Dust particles and other tiny aerosols act as the primary CCN's in the atmosphere. This idea of cloud seeding is to introduce more of these CCN's to ensure more water droplets are formed. The most common artificial CCN used is Silver Iodide, because it's crystalline structure is very close to ice, which is the most efficient CNN. This helps a cloud grow in two ways. First, there are now more water droplets present and the cloud becomes highly saturated. Secondly, as the vapor is condensed to droplets, they release latent heat, which causes the cloud to form even more rapidly. The "seed" acts as a catalyst and helps jump start the natural precipitation process. As the cloud reaches it's maximum saturation level, the water cannot be contained. The result is precipitation. The cloud will then rain itself out and eventually dissipate.

The Olympics are more than just an athletic competition. It is a political event that brings in huge revenue. The Chinese want to make as much money from spectators as possible, and guaranteeing sunny weather is a big help. The government also wishes to show it's intelligence and ingenuity off to the rest of the world. If they are successful in preventing rain over the games, it will be great accomplishment