Providing charge emission for cloud seeding aircraft

Abstract

Releasing charge into natural droplet systems such as fog and clouds offers a route to influence their properties. To facilitate charge release across a wide range of altitudes and meteorological circumstances—such as developing clouds—a charge emitter has been developed for integration with the conventional cloud-seeding flares carried by crewed cloud-seeding aircraft. This allows charge emitters to be used alongside, or instead of, conventional particle releasing flares. The charge emitter flare system is self-contained and self-powered, and includes internal monitoring and recording of its operating parameters. Using this “flare emitter” approach, successful charge emission has been demonstrated in level flight, at 3 km altitude, likely to have exceeded natural ion concentrations by several orders of magnitude. This quantitative verification of successful charge emission can underpin further physically based experiments on the effectiveness of charge release in cloud seeding.