Agricultural failure, water shortage, drought and power-cuts due to a delayed and weak southwest monsoon may soon be a thing of the past if an experiment being conducted by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, bears fruit.

A team of 40 scientists from the institute has begun an experiment of seeding rain clouds across India to trigger an increased rainfall from as early as 2010.

The project called Cloud Aerosol Interaction and Precipitation Enhancement Experiment (CAIPEEX) is a national programme launched by the Central Government. It involves injecting small quantities of specific substances (like aerosols), naturally found in clouds, causing them to open up.

Scientist Dr J R Kulkarni, programme manager of CAIPEEX, who heads the project explained, “Rain usually falls when large water drops in a loaded cloud collide with each other and become large enough to fall down. Sometimes, mainly when the weather is not cool enough, the water vapours keep floating in the form of smaller droplets. To fall they need to get together and form large drops. Aerosols and some other salts facilitate cloud composition.”

CAIPEEX will be carried out in three phases. Phase I, which is presently under way, involves intensive cloud and aerosol observations over different parts of India during May-September 2009. In Phase II, ‘precipitation enhancement’ experiments would be carried out by artificially seeding the clouds in 2010 and 2011. The analysis of the data will then be carried out in the presence of hails or ice slabs in the clouds which can damage aircraft.

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