BEIJING, China (Reuters) — China aims to induce more than 60 billion cubic metres of additional rain a year by 2020 by using an “artificial weather” program.
The country’s water resources are among the world’s lowest at 2,100 cubic metres per person, or just 28 percent of the world average. Shortages are particularly severe in the country’s northeast and northwest.
China has already allocated funds of US$1.05 billion for artificial weather creation since 2008, the State Council said in a document setting out the program from 2014-20.
“Weather modification has an important role to play in easing water shortages, reducing natural disasters, protecting ecology and even safeguarding important events,” it said.
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Sixty billion cubic metres is equivalent to more than one-and-a-half times the volume of the Three Gorges reservoir, which is part of the world’s largest hydro-electric project.
Artificial rain is created using rockets to launch chemicals, such as silver iodide, into clouds.
China used the technology, known as cloud seeding, to scatter clouds ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.
The government wants to increase the country’s rainfall by one-fifth from 2013 levels as a way to battle its crippling water scarcity, which threatens a long-standing policy of self-sufficiency in food production. Shortages are increasing as demand from manufacturing and power generation grows.
The program is also increasingly used to disperse smog in heavily polluted regions.
Seventy percent of China’s rivers and lakes have become too polluted to use.
China recently kicked off the second phase of its South-North Water Diversion Project to send billions of cubic metres of water from central and southern China northward to Beijing and the neighboring area.
However, frequent droughts in central and northern China keep the government under pressure to ensure sufficient water supply.
China launched its “human affected weather” program in 1958 and has done extensive research in cloud seeding. Last year, the government said it had met a target of increasing artificial rain to more than 50 billion cubic metres per year.
China’s “cloud water potential” is huge, with average water vapour levels standing at 1.82 trillion cubic metres, the government said in the recent document.
Existing technology would allow China to potentially induce as much as 280 billion cubic metres of additional rain each year, it added.
