Borrow vision from China if you have to

Hi readers!

Must be surprised why I said this?

You have now read a lot about Atmospheric rivers. Now just read: 

Prologue to the Sky River  

and you will get the answer why I asked the above said question?

Dear readers, Qinghai is a large Chinese province spread across the high-altitude of Tibetan Plateau and is known as a strong Tibetan and Mongol cultural traditions. Tibetan Plateau is often called the “water tower of the world” because.

“it provide water to most of the Asia’s significant rivers comprising Indus, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers and indirectly supply water to more than two billion people downstream.”

Severe water stress in North China Plain: nearly half of which comes from Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, extensive agricultural production and intense industrial activities consuming huge amount of water (mostly coming from Yellow and Yangtze rivers) are now threatening China’s future water security. The scarcity of water in the Yellow River’s catchment (the drainage basin, which is the third largest in China, with an area of some 290,000 square miles) is getting alarming. Fears of  future water shortage due to climate change and the depletion of glacial reserves in the Himalayas are forcing China to employ massive state of the art water precipitation enhancement technologies (such as controlling rain) for her future water security. 

China has been developing weather modification technologies like of cloudseeding stoves through the use of  military rocket engine to burn a chemical compound of silver and potassium iodide since 1950. The stoves were installed on elevated terrain and strategically positioned at high altitudes where upward winds help consuming the chemical to form clouds which trigger rain. It is during this process that Chinese Scientist physically observed the sky river and its related phenomenon for the first time.  

The testing site was the troposphere (the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere where  75-80% mass of the atmosphere, most types of clouds, and all types of weather occurs) above the Sanjiangyuan area of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau which contains the headwaters of three great rivers of Asia: Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong. Convergence of water vapor’s transport channel: the sky river were also identified at this point. The network of automated and remotely operated stoves were placed strategically above this pilot region to modify three dimensional and time-based distribution of precipitation. Up till now,  “Sky River Project” is one of the largest and most ambitious weather engineering projects of China which extract national interests (mentioned only in the text), their identification and authenticity verification for ultimately taking them up into the atmosphere.

According to Chinese,

Sky rivers are a conceptual model of water vapor transport that can, hypothetically, be turned into precipitation through the Sky River Project: a distributed infrastructure of ground and orbital machinery.

In the late 1920s, the Japanese physicist Masanao Abe built an observatory to view Mount Fuji from where he kept recording for 15 years: the clouds that surrounded the mountain. He was interested in the scientific question of how the air currents around Fuji could be visualized by means of film and photography. Unintentionally, Abe’s design fit into a long iconographic (a particular range and/or types of image used by an artist to convey particular meanings) ritual/custom “the mountain and the clouds”. For decades his documentation was left untouched in a Tokyo garden shed. Helmut Völter, while working on his book “Cloud Studies” discovered Abe’s legacy and scrutinized the images of the passionate person who possesses knowledge of cinema and saw a combination of individual images, moving pictures and stereo recordings of clouds (this is what they believe were sky rivers) as the ideal form of scientific evidence. The mere meditation (mental exercise) of these dynamic cloud’s photographs centering on snow-covered Fuji seems to lift the viewer into the air.

Whether Chinese believed that,

“Sky rivers were seen first in 1920 over Mount Fuji” by an iconographic as moving clouds (Today’s Atmospheric Rivers) or not? What they do believe is that,

“We don’t want to just write theoretical essays on Sky Rivers rather we want to write essays on the ground”.

For the Yellow River to flow continuously, we have been working for 10 years; we also want to do this next for 10 years to see if we can find a new way to solve the water shortage of the Yellow River? 

Said Wang Guangqian, Principal Investigator of the Digital Yellow River Model, president of Qinghai University, and leader of the Sky River team.

This is what they are doing for their national interest and rightly so. The world know it except the authorities in Pakistan (perhaps the most ill-informed creatures on this planet earth).

Jonathan Watts from Global Environment editor wrote on December 3^rd, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/03/china-vows-to-boost-weather-modification-capabilities

“China is planning for a rapid expansion of its weather modification programme to cover an area more than one and a half times the size of India. They wanted to extend the artificial rain and snow programme to cover at least 2.1 m sq miles (5.5m sq km) of land by 2025. The long-term plan envisages that by 2035, the country’s weather modification capabilities would reach an “advanced” level (they might already have reached there) and focus on revitalizing rural regions, restoring ecosystems and minimizing losses from natural disasters.”

They are pursuing the world’s biggest cloud-seeding operation, which already employed an estimated 35,000 people. For six decades, the communist nation has deployed military aircraft and anti-aircraft guns to lace clouds with silver iodide or liquid nitrogen to thicken water droplets to the point where they fall as snow or rain. The technology has mostly been used at a local level to alleviate droughts or clear skies ahead of major events, such as the 2008 Olympics  or 70^th, anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.

It follows a rapid buildup of capacity in recent years. A 2017 plan earmarked $168m (1.15bn yuan which must have been increased by now) for four new planes, eight upgraded craft, 897 rocket launchers and 1,856 digital control devices to cover 370,000 miles, about 10% of China’s territory.

Part of that is a new weather modification system in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau: Asia’s biggest freshwater reserve. Chinese scientists are working on the ambitious Tianhe (Sky Rivers) project  to divert water vapor northwards from the Yangtze River basin to the Yellow River basin, where it would rain.

They say, “they have found potential channels near the boundary of the troposphere that could carry 5bn cubic meters of water annually. The China’s Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation has reportedly constructed hundreds of chambers in the mountain region known as “Asia’s water tower”  to feed silver iodide into the atmosphere in large volumes. This attempt would ease shortages in the dry region of North of China but may exacerbate problems in the South-east Asia and India if it affect the flow of the Mekong, Salween or Brahmaputra rivers: all of which have their sources on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau.

Dear readers, we claim that China is our tried and trusted friend.

“This friendship is sweeter than honey, deeper that ocean and higher than Himalaya”.

Can we go beyond this rhetoric? Perhaps not, because we can not think beyond this

Do we know even a bit of what Himalaya can do to our economy? Our water security? Our food security? We don’t know even ABCD of what China is doing to secure their national interest which we don’t even understand. We lack capacity to communicate, to understand, to comprehend and to even a bit of vision that the God almighty has bestowed upon China. Can we learn from their experience? Can we borrow a bit of their vision?

Can we learn cloud seeding to combat the smog problem which is getting worst every year?

Borrowing vison is better than borrowing capital. Think about that.

More next week dear readers. Till then, Take care, Bye.