With a depression causing heavy rain in Mumbai and northern Maharashtra, the clouds too seem to be heading that way. The result: no cloud seeding in the State on Tuesday.
The weather-monitoring radar installed in Bengaluru could not find any ‘seedable clouds’ in a 200-km radius of the State capital on Tuesday, observed the operation monitoring committee. Tuesday was the second day in a row that the operation was stalled. On Monday, the sole aircraft in operation had to be grounded for repair and maintenance.
“The radar looks for moisture-laden clouds, which can result in rain of 20mm or more. The density of clouds present over south interior Karnataka was low, to the tune of giving just 5mm of rainfall. As cloud seeding will enhance rains by 15% to 20%, we felt it was not worth carrying out the operation on Tuesday if the result was an increase in rainfall of barely 1 mm,” said V.S. Prakash, a meteorologist and member of the monitoring committee.
The committee hopes that seeding will resume on Wednesday.
The ₹35-crore cloud seeding operation has had a mixed run so far. Since its inauguration on August 21, clouds were seeded on five days only while no seeding was done on four days. A total of 23 clouds have been seeded in parts of Ramanagaram, Mysuru and Hassan districts.
Next target: Gadag
The project may get a boost with the arrival of the second aircraft and the calibration of a weather-monitoring radar in Gadag. The second aircraft will be stationed in Hubballi airport. With this, officials hope to extend cloud seeding to north Karnataka, particularly the Malaprabha and Tungabhadra basins.
ATCs in the loop
Officials solved the problem of getting clearances from Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs), who control the air space above Bengaluru, after a meeting with representatives of civilian and defence airports on Tuesday.
The issue arose after two cloud-seeding attempts — over Tumakuru, Hassan and Chikkamagalur districts — were aborted after the aircraft was not given permission by ATCs at Kempegowda International Airport or defence airports at Yelahanka and HAL.
This prompted the State government to bring the ATCs in the loop.
“After a detailed presentation on the objectives of the project, the ATCs have agreed to provide some relaxation to our aircraft. KIAL will share their schedule with us while we will submit our flight plan around two hours in advance to the defence airports,” said H.P. Prakash Kumar, Chief Engineer, Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (RDPR), and who is in charge of the project.
