By sheer accident, I happened a few days ago to meet a young Dutch hippy who, when I happened to mention cloudbusting, told me he and a group of friends had done a cloudbusting operation last summer. They had thought the summer was too cloudy, and normally would have had more sunny weather at that time of year, so they had done a lot of research on the internet, sent e-mails to several of the most prominent names they found there, and then proceeded to construct five cloudbusters, which they placed in a circle all around the city of Almelo, in the province of Overijssel, in Holland.
Almelo happens to be the site of a uranium refinery which produces enriched uranium for use in nuclear reactors, so I would expect the local sky to be DORish, "bleak", and lacking in energy, and if there were heavy clouds around, they would be DOR clouds and would not produce much, if any, rain. In short, I would expect a more-or-less chronic semi-drought situation, relieved from time to time, in the usually moist European climate, by the movement across the region of storms large enough to pass through before being dismantled by the DOR infesting the area.
My aquaintance told me the operation was a success. They had dry, sunny weather for the two months they kept operating. Those two months were June and July. Curious to see what the weather was like in those two months and in the month following the conclusion of the operation in the region to the east of the operation site, which is where the natural west-to-east motion of the atmosphere would naturally carry the effects, I did a quick search on Google for "drought", "Germany", and "2010".
Here is what I found:
Drought and Floods: A Record Summer of Extremes - SPIEGEL ...
www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,714917,00.htmlSimilar31 Aug 2010 – It has been a summer of record-breaking weather in Germany, with extreme heat and drought followed by the wettest August on record, the ...
3. extreme heat
There is, of course, no evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship, and a correspondent in Germany says it did not seem so bad to him and suggests the news media reports of the drought may have been exagerated either because of a preoccupation with economic factors or because stories of catastrophes sell newspapers, but even so, and circumstancial as the case is, it is enough to justify extreme caution in any future cloudbusting operations. Especially in the vicinity of a major nuclear installation.
I had at the time attributed the heat wave to the desert-greening project underway in Algeria, which has been known in recent past summers to shift the hot, dry air mass that normally hangs over North Africa northward to Europe. But my conclusion might have been premature. I hereby offer an appology to the people concerned with that project in Algeria, since it now looks more like the most important actor in the European drama of the summer of 2010 may have been closer to home.
An ungrounded, or poorly-grounded cloudbuster, conducting a vertical draw in the close vicinity of a nuclear installation might create a condition of "clear" skies" because instead of the draw causing a contraction, as a vertical draw with a properly-grounded unit usually does, it would be over-exciting the already intensly excited atmosphere, causing an expansion of the atmosphere, leading to clear, dry. "oranur weather" conditions, that if continued long enough, would constitute a drought.
There would be effects in all directions, spreading out from the drawsite in a series of concentric circles, just as an oranur effect spreads out in all directions, including against the prevailing wind, but the most dramatic effects would show up to the east of the site of the draw due to the west-to-east movement of the atmospheric energy stream carrying the affected air mass along with it.
Followed by the collapse of the hyper-.expanded oranur-excited system when the drawing operation stopped, resulting in the floods in August.
Is that what actually did happen? I do not know. But the chain of logic is strong enough that if I believed in Karma, I would not want to be one of those hippies.