The news may raise a few sceptical eyebrows in an Ireland still reeling from weeks of rain, but Chinese meteorologists have promised perfect weather for next year's Beijing Olympics. They plan to blast any dark, ominous clouds with rockets to ensure only blue skies greet the world's athletes.
Beijing's Olympic organisers are pragmatic people with a can-do
kind of attitude and that extends to controlling the weather. The
Chinese have been saying for years that they are not worried about
it raining on their parade, which starts at 8pm on the eighth day
of the eighth month, 2008, even
though August is the rainy season in normally tinder-dry
Beijing.
The presence of so many eights - in China, eight is the luckiest number - should be enough to keep the clouds off, even if weather patterns for the past 30 years indicate a 50 per cent chance of rain for both the opening ceremony and the closing ceremony two weeks later.
But to ensure blue skies, top meteorologist Zheng Guoguang told
the China Daily newspaper they would be using rockets and would be
practising next month. "As summer is a rainy season, this practice
will become the focus of the meteorological services for the games
which will be held in the
same season next year," he said.
The whole city will be gearing up for plans to fine-tune "rain prevention" techniques. They are particularly keen to ensure no rain falls on the opening ceremony in the new Olympic stadium, which no longer has a roof due to cost savings.
Beijing weatherman Wang Yubin explained the process. The weather bureau will use rockets containing silver iodine and dry ice. These will be fired high into the atmosphere at rain-heavy clouds and act as a catalyst, forcing the rain clouds to burst hours before the athletes tog out.
It sounds simple, but you need accurate weather forecasts for the procedure to work. A problem for the organisers is that the shortage of rain this summer has made testing difficult. August is really the only month that Beijing experiences rain as the city lies in a desert climate and has been experiencing a drought for many years.
"We need more rain," said Zhang Qiang, an official in charge of the capital's artificial rain-making and prevention programme. Rain prevention is a much tougher challenge than bringing on a downpour. Cloud-seeding, where chemicalinfused rockets are fired into clouds to induce rain, is a feature of life in Beijing. Organisers also plan to generate rain to clear smog. In case bursting the clouds doesn't do the trick, the government is planning to ban a million cars from the streets next month to see if that will help.
