More on cloud seeding

Guwan Seeya, in his above titled letter, explains how rains occur. He also mentions how artificial rains are caused. He says he is at a loss to understand why our so-called scientific community and meteorologists have not taken action to seed clouds.

In the early 1980s during Minister for Power and Energy, D. B.Wijetunga’ tensure, as far as I could remember, a group of CEB engineers, led by the Commercial Manager was sent to Vietnam to study cloud seeding. They came back and experimented with the assistance of the Sri Lanka Air Force which resulted in a failure. The main reason was that ours was a small Island and rains could not be made to fall in the desired small patch catchment areas. The cloud that were sprayed with chemicals moved and caused rains in the ocean!

When he speaks of reservoirs and inland waterways, I am reminded of some scientists promoting floating solar power plants in our hydro reservoirs, and this method may affect the natural occurrence of rains. Will this affect the weather patterns and thereby cause worst disasters? Some scientists, like horses with blinkers, are blind to the adverse effects of what they propose.

As one old farmer said if our ancient tanks or wewas, numbering over 30,000 built by our kings of old to provide water to farmers are restored, during, dry season, they could be used for agricultural purposes and hydro reservoirs could be could be reserved for generating electricity.

That is food for thought for our present-day rulers to change the course in developing the country, which was traditionally known to have been agricultural.

G. A. D. Sirimal

BORALESGAMUWA