China plans to control weather for Olympics

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Cloud seeding to be used to prevent rainfall

WASHINGTON -- China's plan to keep the skies sunny and clear during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing shows how far weather modification has come, climatologists say.

If a storm approaches the city, the Chinese said they would seed the clouds with silver iodide to force rainfall, cleansing the air and ensuring spectators and athletes stay dry.

Weather patterns over Beijing in recent decades indicate a 50 percent chance of rain, Chinese meteorologists say. Air pollution from industry and automobiles also is a problem.

The Chinese are as likely as anyone to have scientists skilled enough to stop the rain, said Joseph Golden, senior research scientist for the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colo.

The Chinese government has one of the world's largest weather-modification programs, spending about $100 million on the projects and training about 1,500 scientists to administer them, he said. Most of the effort involves increasing rainfall for agriculture.

Weather modification in the United States is more sporadic and done mostly by state or local governments.

"We have fallen behind," Mr. Golden said.

The techniques have been used to increase snowfall in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, to clear up icy fog around Salt Lake City International Airport, decrease the size of hail in North Dakota and increase rainfall in Texas.

Changing the weather for a few days during the Olympics is a step beyond any previous efforts by the Chinese, he said.

"This is a whole new thing for them," Mr. Golden said.

Cloud seeding is nothing new, but doing it successfully to prevent rainfall in a specific place is a tricky proposition, according to climatologists.

"I think there's a good chance" Chinese scientists can prevent rain from falling on the Olympics, said Ross Hoffman, vice president of Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc., a Lexington, Mass., company that does customized weather forecasting for industry.