Blizzard Renews Storm Over China Making Snow

November 16, 2009

By Jason Dean

BEIJING -- Heavy snowfall in northern China is testing the country's disaster preparedness and prompting fresh questions about Beijing's efforts to alter its weather.

A massive blizzard over the past week has dumped some of the heaviest snow in five decades on China's usually arid north, clogging highways and collapsing buildings in seven provinces. The storm, which began Monday, had caused at least $650 million in damage as of Friday afternoon and killed more than 40 people in traffic accidents or building collapses triggered by the snow and ice, the government said.

This week's storm follows an unusually early snowfall that blanketed Beijing on Nov. 1. Government media attributed the intensity of that storm to the Beijing Weather Modification Office, which is responsible for cloud-seeding operations in the capital, whose downtown area is surrounded by farmland. The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted a top official at the office saying it had created 16 million metric tons of additional snow. "We won't miss any opportunity [for] artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought," the official, Zhang Qiang, was quoted as saying.

The government's role in that storm angered some people. One blogger on the popular Web site Sohu.com posted a photograph of angry passengers on a grounded flight, and suggested that the weather-modification office should be required to pay compensation for the disruptions the snow caused. "The weather belongs to everyone, not just to the 'Department of Artificial Interference with the Weather,'" he wrote.

At the start of this week's storm -- which dumped varying amounts of snow across the region but totaled well over a foot in some places -- some observers assumed the weather manipulators were at work again. A report in the state-backed China Daily, an English-language newspaper, carried the headline "Weather Is Manipulated Again for Snow," and cited an unnamed official from the weather-modification office saying that it had caused the precipitation, but declining to elaborate.

But experts on weather modification say it is nearly impossible for a storm of the scale and intensity of this week's to have been meaningfully affected by cloud-seeding efforts. And the Beijing Weather Modification Office is denying any involvement. An official there said Thursday that it hadn't seeded clouds this week, and that its efforts in the earlier snowfall were limited to parts of the city. An official at the weather-modification office in Hebei, the province surrounding Beijing, said it also hadn't seeded clouds in the past week to avoid aggravating the storm, which meteorologists had been predicting for days.

The confusion over the government's role in the latest blizzard reflects both the scope of China's weather-modification efforts, and the aura of almost mystical ability that surrounds them in the minds of many Chinese and foreign observers.

China's water supply relative to its 1.3 billion-person population is roughly a fourth the world's average, and the shortage is worse in the north. Beijing's ratio is 1/30th the global average. Local governments in dry areas across China -- as in other countries -- have long sought to wring more rain from the sky for crops and reservoirs.

In China, they use artillery shells, rockets and airplanes to spray existing cloud systems with silver iodide, a compound that triggers moisture in the clouds to form ice crystals, which then fall to earth as snow or rain.

The Beijing Weather Modification Office gained fame around last year's Beijing Olympics for trying to drain clouds near the city ahead of Aug. 8 Opening Ceremonies. In the end, the highly anticipated event was rain free, although it remains unclear whether that resulted from modification or good luck.

More broadly, many residents of the capital see the office's hand in the uncannily consistent absence of rain on politically sensitive days like the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China on Oct. 1, when top leaders watched a lavish military parade in downtown Beijing.

Scientists say that cloud-seeding is less potent than many people believe, however. It can augment precipitation, but only by perhaps 10% to 20%, says Wang Guanghe, director of the Institute of Weather Modification at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. Weather modification's "power is still limited," Mr. Wang says.

It is also hard to measure. Experts say the sort of exact estimates attributed to the Beijing Weather Modification Office official by Xinhua -- 16 million tons of extra snow -- is nearly impossible to make for any individual storm, although statistics gathered painstakingly over years can enable estimates of the effectiveness of longer-term efforts.

One reason for confusion over China's weather modification efforts is its relative lack of transparency. Duncan Axisa, president of the Weather Modification Association in Fresno, Calif., says only two of the roughly 170 members of his international organization come from China -- and they joined recently. China's weather-modification experts have published relatively little in English. "The Chinese weather-modification program is a really closed program," he says.

—Ellen Zhu, Kersten Zhang and Gao Sen contributed to this article.

Source: Wall Street Journal