Iran Attains Indigenized Technology for Cloud Seeding

“The ground generators for cloud seeding have now successfully passed the stages of laboratory and field tests and are ready for mass-production on an industrial scale,” said Majid Aliabadi, the managing-director of Novin Tajhiz Danesh Faza Fajr company and a faculty member of the Islamic Azad University’s Birjand branch.

He added that in these generators, which are installed on high altitudes and mountainous areas, special formulations of special cloud seeding materials are used along with propane gas and acetone solution to create rain-making nuclei.

“The generators can produce hundreds of billions of rain-making nuclei every minute which are directed into the clouds by the rising currents in susceptible areas and cause an increase in the ice nuclei and condensation in the cloud, which subsequently accelerates and increases raining and the amount of rainfall,” Aliabadi said.

Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique that improves a cloud’s ability to produce rain or snow by introducing tiny ice nuclei into certain types of subfreezing clouds. These nuclei provide a base for snowflakes to form.

After cloud seeding takes place, the newly formed snowflakes quickly grow and fall from the clouds back to the surface of the Earth, increasing snowpack and streamflow.  

Cloud seeding can be done from ground-based generators or aircraft.

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