Laser weather modification

[CORed]

Such a scheme probably would require quite a bit less energy input.

Does water vapor also become ionized?

Through what column depth does this operate, or to put it another way, what is the rate of attenuation along the beam?

I should think that in any event water vapour content would have to be above some minimum level, say around 80-90%.

Which leads to the conclusion that there would likely have to be cloud present already; certainly a clear, dry airmass could hardly be expected to be made to squeeze out any amount of actual precipitation.

It would seem that this is essentially just another method of cloud seeding. It might be more effective or less expensive than the long-used method of seeding with silver iodide, but silver iodide cloud seeding hasn't been proven to be effective for much other than local dissipation of super-cooled fog. There is some evidence that it will increase orographic snowfall.

Of course much of the problem is that it's rather difficult to prove the effect of any attempt at weather modification. No two weather systems are exactly alike and weather forecasting is far from an exact science. So you seeded the clouds here and X amount of precipitation fell, but how much precipitation would have fallen if you hadn't seeded?

 

[CORed]

Yes and I remember reading about that too along with digging canals with multiple atomic bursts.

There were actually two nuclear devices detonated underground in Colorado in an effort to make natural gas available from tight shale formations (now done routinely by "fracking" and directional drilling). The result was that gas was produced, but was too radioactive for commercial use.