Abstract
All fresh-water, whether on the surface or underground, comes from the atmosphere in the form of precipitation. Nevertheless, a large volume of water present in the clouds is never transformed into precipitation on the ground. This has prompted researchers to explore the possibility of augmenting water supplies by the use of “cloud seeding” technique to initiate and accelerate the precipitation process. The seeding technique is expected to provide an increase in precipitation from the cloud and provide rain almost immediately at the targeted region/ location. This is done by dispersing suitable substances into the cloud that serve as cloud condensation or ice nuclei. Although many projects around the world have successfully demonstrated a considerable increase in precipitation due to seeding, majority of the projects, however, yielded inconclusive results on precipitation enhancement [1]. The reason for this inconsistency is that the physical mechanisms of aerosol effects on cloud and precipitation development are much more complex than anticipated earlier. There are many ongoing operational cloud seeding programs and the number has been steadily increasing with time. Despite this, there is still a great need for more intensive FIELD experiments to standardize the cloud seeding technology for increased reliability and enhancement of precipitation from clouds. The technology of rain enhancement is based on the science of cloud physics with major linkages reaching into mesoscale and boundary layer meteorology, weather forecasting, diffusion and turbulence, physical chemistry, aerosol physics, statistics, and instrumentation [2,3,4]. In this paper, we present the details of the multi-wavelength dual polarization lidar being used and the methodology to monitor the various cloud parameters involved in the precipitation process.
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Sudhakar, P., Sheela, K.A., Satyanarayana, M. (2021). Optimisation of Cloud Seeding Criteria Using a Suite of Ground-Based Instruments. In: Laxminidhi, T., Singhai, J., Patri, S.R., Mani, V.V. (eds) Advances in Communications, Signal Processing, and VLSI. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 722. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4058-9_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4058-9_33
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