In his office at the Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Yao explained the strategy for protecting the National Stadium. China had tried rain-prevention ventures before, Yao said—at the Tiananmen Square celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic in 1999, for instance, and at the 10th National Games in Nanjing in 2005—but the leading practitioner of anti-rain seeding was the former Soviet Union. Yao, a compact and muscular man with thin-rimmed glasses, pointed to a floor tile to represent the Olympic grounds. He traced three semicircles, one inside the next, where the mountains would be. The majority of summer storms, Yao said, come from the northwest, the west, or the southwest. Starting at the outermost line, the modifiers plan to seed approaching storms to encourage rainfall, in the hopes that they rain themselves out. By the nearest line, the goal will be instead to overseed the surviving clouds to suppress rain entirely. So rain seeding and anti-rain seeding “are not two strategies that are contradictory to each other,” Yao said. “We have to use them both."

But the theory and technology were no match for last year’s monsoon. August was marked by powerful downpours and flooding in the city. One evening that month, I went to a neighborhood restaurant under clear skies. By the time I finished dinner, it was as if the streets were being sprayed with a celestial firehose: A row of mature trees had been downed, cabs crept through water up to their hubcaps, and pedestrians waded with their pants rolled past their knees.

Thunder was rumbling at the Xinzhuang Village firing station when I arrived one afternoon last June, riding up a dirt lane in a city taxicab. Beijing’s whole network of modifiers had been at work earlier in the week, the WMO said, and the humidity hadn’t budged. The launch site was on a ridgetop 1,400 feet above sea level in the middle of a 50-acre orchard run by a farmer named Jing Baoguo. An island platform stood in the middle of an irrigation reservoir, under a striped canopy, with catwalks leading to and from it. Along the far side of the enclosure was a grape arbor; on the near side, tomato plants flanked weather instruments.

The artillery stood off to the right: two antiaircraft guns, their barrels poking out over the fence top, and a pair of blocky rocket launchers mounted on single-axle trailers. In front of a large shed sat a silver-iodide RGY-1 burner, a gleaming barrel-shaped contraption with three wheels, a conical nose, and a long chimney that looked like a barbecue smoker. By the side wall of the shed was a white doghouse with a medium-sized black dog inside.

Jing, a wavy-haired man in earth tone slacks and a pullover, leased the orchard six years ago, after working as a purchaser in a local trading organization. After his trees suffered hail damage that year, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau approached him about becoming a weather modifier and setting up a station on his land. The Xinzhuang site is one of four the bureau has added since 2001, with farmers supplying the property, local government funding construction, and the bureau supplying the guns and other equipment. The modifiers are paid 50 yuan, or about $7, for every shell fired, which would typically top out at six on a day like today.

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Posted on Apr 17, 2008 at 7:57 AM
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