Power of the Idea and Idea so Powerful

John F. Kennedy once said:

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance. Ideas are inspirational.

The idea:

Do you not see the Yellow River come from the sky?

What an unbelievably powerful idea

Hi readers!

Do you believe that Yellow River of China comes from the sky?

You don’t? I also and got to know only when I read the article “Prologue to China” which starts with the above-mentioned poetic phrase by “Li Bai” (of Tang Dynasty) who utter this in 752 AD.  Since then, Chinese are making every effort to convert this idea into a practical reality. The current “sky river project” is today’s practical manifestation of that “powerful idea”.

(How may ideas we have been bestowed upon? Have we every tried to pursue them with this spirit?)

Introduction

The desire to control weather is not new and is being manipulated since 1945. Similarly, it is not unique for the people of China. The Sky River “both as conceptual model and the weather modification project” is also to tell the world how actively she is working on her “dynastically powerful idea” to manage her water resources for thousands of years and has been openly developing weather modification technologies since 1950s. As the water consumption of China expended, her desire to build rain making network flourished accordingly which now is “three times of the size of Spain”.

One of the technologies used for this purpose is cloud seeding stove: a basic metallic envelope on a pedestal covering over a high-performance combustion chamber like of a military rocket engine which is being used to burn silver and potassium iodide. The stoves are installed on strategically positioned high altitudes where upward winds exhaust the chemical into cloud formations to trigger rain and where physical embodiment of “Sky River” both as phenomenon and as project is seen for the first time and from where Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong rivers have their origins: the Tibetan Plateau. The Yangtze and Mekong rivers flow through the Southern part of China with plenty of water because of its humid weather while Yellow River mainly flow in the North where frequency of rainfall is comparatively low therefore,  

“The aim of the Sky River project is to transfer more water from Yangtze to Yellow river at their points of origin (pl. see the figure below which is self explanatory) using “water vapor transport” supported by cloud seeding and the satellite network”.

This way, more than 5 billion cubic meters rainwater year¹ would ultimately flow into the Yellow River to keep it flowing till the end of times.  No comprehensive theory or technology can show how precisely China will control the formation of clouds or rains,” as it is only confined to the “scientists who are responsible for helping the government making the right decisions” who also briefed the public accordingly. An irrigation engineer at Qinghai University said,

“the project is already under way as we have our own considerations,” he said, without elaborating.

The massive project aims at producing rainfall over an area of > 1.6 million square kilometers (620,000 square miles), or roughly 12 times the size of England, and has already received about 100 million yuan (US$14.5 million) in funding.  

The testing site of the project is Sanjiangyuan province (point of origin of Yellow, Yangtse and Mekong rivers) which creates problems quite often because the stakeholders some time don’t comprehend the abilities of those who explain the project on site through modeling and computation. For them, resolving the conflicts among their hierarchies are more important compared to computers and modeling which is not their forte.

It is important to note, that in the atmosphere, the transboundary hydro-geo-logic (physical features that control direction of groundwater flow in a groundwater system) prohibit the flow control based on surfaces, routes, and boundaries rather than on logic of the flows and routes, because  they ignore completely that,  

“in the areas where essentials of the climate crisis are unfolding and where regulation and conflicts are emerging, it is the atmosphere that produces multiple localities on the ground where these transformations can be observed, and sites of their mediation can be imagined”.

Evolution of Earth’s atmosphere and the implicated role

The atmosphere of the Planet Earth has evolved slowly over some four and a half billion years. Mesosphere: the third in Earth’s history, also called third atmosphere) is a gas and aerosol envelope extending out from land, ocean, and ice toward outer space. It is most dense near the surface of the Earth, where gravity pulls gases and microscopic particles of dust, smoke, and chemicals inward to settle on the surface, where they are absorbed by its inhabitants. These inhabitants are protected by the creation and maintenance of pressure that allows water to exist in each of its three phases: solid, liquid, and gas. All these factors contribute to climate regulation through absorption and retention of solar radiation (heat) required for warming of the planet’s surface.

The atmosphere also contains variable amount of water vapor with an estimated volume of about 37.5 million-billion gallons which move into the atmosphere either through evaporation or through transpiration. When the water vapors moved up, they meet aerosols: some of which are hygroscopic (water attracting).  In a stable/saturated air, these aerosols pull water vapor to form the foundations of cloud droplets (dew). When such droplet grows in volume, weight, and height, they become a cloud and fall back down toward the surface of the Earth as rain.

These droplets assist the distribution of  Sun’s energy while storms push and pull energy from the equator to the poles and back which is a straightforward process but “grows increasingly complicated as heat, evaporation, turbulence, radiation, wind, geography, and other factors come into play. The science of clouds, therefore requires an understanding of the entire atmosphere, including all of its dynamics and externalities. Hence,

It is no coincidence that one of the greatest challenges to climate change prediction is inadequate representation of cloud in the processes.

Hence, frequent observations of the entire spectrum of atmosphere over global scales is a pre-requisite for climate scientists to verify their model more accurately for reliable predictions. The objective can be achieved through Afternoon Train (‘A-Train’: assembly of satellites that travel one behind the other along the same track as they orbit Earth) which can observe the movement of clouds around the planet along with their vertical structure allowing the observer to inspect the clouds from inside.

In the troposphere, water vapor also exists in the form of filamentary structures that are constantly fluctuating as if they had the characteristics of rivers that flow on the land. In 1992, scientists from MIT and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center proposed naming these filaments tropospheric rivers whose lengths is several folds more than their widths, persisting many days while being interpreted through the atmosphere.

NASA found this accidently while Measuring Air Pollution by Satellites (MAPS) for  providing a near-global map of the distribution of carbon monoxide in the lower atmosphere. They were alarmed to see thermal fingerprints of the air polluting molecule located far away from the potential source of their emission. The distribution pattern was incomplete because it was beyond the capabilities of MAPS to sense through clouds. Upon turning to data provided by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS): instrument designed to get detailed portrait of the atmosphere, scientist observed moisture pathways connecting the concentrations of carbon monoxide to their source regions because Water Vapors, were responsible for the transport of carbon monoxide in the troposphere over long distances.

After establishing this, question arose: “if a practical use be made of the apparent relation between TOMS images and “water vapor flux” of lower atmosphere?

Answer emerged just two years later, when Newell and Zhu (Atmospheric rivers and bombs: Environmental Sciences, 1994) established,

“that  the filamentary structures (tropospheric rivers) are, in fact, responsible for the transport of almost all the water vapors in the atmosphere despite discharging a third of the water they carry either as rain or snowfall. These structures which originate in the tropical and subtropical region and travel pole wards, represent such features of global atmospheric circulation that evidence of their presence can be observed in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica.

A new concept of atmospheric water was thus proposed between 2016 and 2018 by scientists from Tsinghua and Qinghai Universities by naming Blue water found in rivers, lakes, underground aquifers, and other sources that can be used by humans directly, Green water which directly evaporates from the land surface and transpires from vegetation, while White water exists when and where moisture with a high potential to precipitate moves into “discontinuities (gaps) in the atmospheric flow creating special boundary layers by air masses which are characterized by different gradients of temperature, velocity, pressure, or humidity upon meeting each other in the troposphere. The engineers and scientists named these discontinuities (gaps) as  “sky rivers”: specific bodies of tropospheric water filaments that support identifiable spatial and temporal dimensions.

The focus of the previous research on atmospheric rivers has remained on the transportation of water vapor and its short-term manifestation in extreme weather events, while attention of “sky river project” is on “long-term configuration infrastructure” of atmospheric rivers so that they may be “fully brought into the water resources management system”.

More next week dear readers to show power of the idea practically.

Till then, keep thinking about the “ideas” one of which will definitely be powerful. Bye