Exuders of Particulates, Rain-Makers
cosmos blog 110303
Exuders of Particulates, Rain-Makers
In my life as perhaps in yours, there were no shortages of documentaries on the great world wars. If so, how often have you heard the term, "and then the rains came". One of my favorite mottos (and I use it so often it must be a toe motto) is, a hint is all you get.
So my little hint, which had already been reinforced by noticing in the untold number of the war documentaries which outlined the commensuration of open conflict and heavy arms exchange before the classic then-the-rains entries, my little hint, mind you, was after the
horrific wild fires, I was listening to a news item on public radio about it when I heard the same
phrase, "and then the rains came..." and went on to talk about ensuing floods taking hoses along with them in the mud slides and so on.
Then I heard a fire fighter mention that the San Diego wildfires of ought three were a hundred years in the making. Wow, thanks again, twentieth century. It the Smoky-the-Bear syndrome. No fires at all, with all technology devoted to that effect.
Well, the plume of smoke went out to sea for hundreds of miles. This was an extrusion of particulate matter sent aloft by the heat. So let's use this disastrous
mishap to mankind, par-for-the-course, apparently for nature, to observe if indeed for some reason there is a remarkable incidence of precipitation on the same
vicinity.
Where else have I seen that? I was trying to do some artwork when I first got to Australia, and I was staying as the guest of a Gelong native I had met in Indonesia, Ron Anderson. He had built his little A-frame house on an acreage south of Gelong in the countryside out of "mud bricks" he made himself. As I was staying there, I noticed the whole
forested environs were blackened by a recent fire.
I found out that the year before, I think, '83 or '82, there had been a huge wildfire, which they call bush fires, called, I believe, the "Good Friday" fire, after the day it occurred. Then, while I was there, guess what? The rains came. They filled the
reservoirs, previously practically emptied by years of successive drought, the land was saturated, everyone's water tanks and "dams" (small dug areas in fields for livestock watering) filled to the brim and overflowed. They had a record wheat harvest.
Now I'm remembering the accounts I heard about when I was in Australia, a total of six years, by the way, off and on, about the
Aborigines peoples doing controlled burning of vast areas of the bush. I thought it remarkable that any collective of human beings would be wise enough to do so. They certainly had a grip on the realities of their harsh environment.
But today the thought hit me that not only were they doing some kind of an act of stewardship and even fire prevention by their actions, though skeptics claim that it was only a hunting ploy to flush out came as it fled the fires, but also, on the more altruistic note, it occurred to me that they were doing something classic to mankind ever since
droughts threatened lives: rain making.
The particulate matter may act as the rain making devise. Certain events, small though they seem, may have a steering influence on the overall weather pattern often referred to as "the Butterfly Effect". Though there may not be a way yet to really explain the physics involved, it may be perhaps understood by pointing out that this could be a survival influence or a natural progression of events to
rejuvenate the destroyed lands, since fires of this type are noted to be a part of the cycle of nature in many parts of the
biosphere.
It might even be that the carbon molecules injected into the heights of the troposphere, however high it is, may act as a conductor of sorts in an ion
exchange that might even serve to attract moisture from great distances. That the rain itself, or the ingredients thereof aloft are actually partially, at least, ion-driven, hence electrical, the function of which is like a huge battery that functions not as a source of electricity, but rather as a driver to draw precipitation from wet dominance to dry dominance conditions.
If that may be so, then there appears that it doesn't always happen just because an area is dry, but when an area extrudes particulate matter of some sort, such as smoke from wildfires, or maybe in some cases, dust particles. Though dust may not do it, witness the Harmattan, the fierce winds that blow sand from the Sahara off shore. Then there were the oil fires in
Kuwait in the first Gulf war in 1990. I'm not privy to that data, it would be interesting to see if any precipitation resulted from that.
It's just that, under certain conditions, in certain areas, when particulates of certain types were extruded into the
atmosphere in such a way as to attract documentation, I couldn't help but notice the inevitable
phrase, "...and then the rains came." as if it had never happened like that anywhere else.
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