"Olympics ROUNDUP: Bolt hoping for double; officials hoping for good weather

By Peter Auf der Heyde, dpa

Beijing (dpa) - Jamaican sprint sensation Usain Bolt will go for a sprint double at the Beijing Games in a boost for Olympic athletics, it was confirmed on Sunday.

There was less good news for organizers as they were warned that rain could dampen Friday's proposed opening ceremony, while typhoons could cause a postponement of the equestrian and sailing events.

Zhang Qiang, the deputy director of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, said she expected rainfall over Beijing during the Games to be slightly more than normal.

'The temperature will also be slightly higher,' she said.

This has left organizers fearing that Friday's opening ceremony, which has been shrouded in secrecy but is promising to be a spectacular affair, could be affected by the rain.

Wang Jianjie, deputy director of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, said there could be rainfall on the day the August 8-24 Games are officially opened.

'The weather on Friday is expected to be overcast to cloudy. There is a possibility for a periodic shower or thunderstorm. The highest temperature will reach about 30 to 32 degrees centigrade.'

Organizers have said they have a plan B ready for the opening ceremony, should it rain.

It is believed that officials are considering using a technology developed by American scientists that prematurely causes rain.

Zhang of the Weather Modification Office said that the modification of clouds and rain was still at the early stages of experimentation.

'We have to distinguish between cold and warm clouds and apply the technique. When we have appropriate weather conditions, we may try such techniques as a contingency plan. We will see if certain weather conditions will affect Beijing and if we need to apply certain techniques.'

But if Beijing weather officials have the option of trying to ensure a dry opening, organizers in Qingdao, where the sailing events are to be held, are more worried.

A typhoon could hit the eastern coastal city, causing some of the races to be postponed. Wang said that this would not cause huge problems as 'typhoons last just a day or two. They will not last long.'

Organizers in Hong Kong are similarly scared of typhoons disrupting the equestrian events, but organizers have already included spare days in case events have to be delayed or postponed.

Bolt's agent Ricky Simms, meanwhile, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that the 21-year old would be running in both the 100m and 200m at the Olympic Games.

'He is the fastest in the world in both events this year,' Simms said.

Bolt raised the 100m world record to 9.72 seconds on May 31 in New York and also boasts the fastest 200m time of the year with 19.67 seconds.

The phenomenal 100m time prompted Bolt and his coach Glen Mills to add the distance to the 200m he had long planned to run in Beijing.

In other news, the IOC has allowed athletes to blog their Beijing experiences on the world wide web.

The Olympic Charter prohibits any journalistic work by athletes, but since the Turin Winter Games 2006 the IOC has been forced to acknowledge a new era and allow blogging during the Olympics.

Under special IOC rules, the blog is not to contain interviews, photos and moving pictures from areas reserved for accredited people. A photo of the athlete is allowed, but not taken in an Olympic area.

Australian cyclist Cadel Evans, who finished second in the Tour de France last week, is winning his race to be fit for the Games, Australian Olympic officials said Sunday.

'Cadel is hoping to compete in the time trial and the road race,' Australian Olympic supremo John Coates told a news conference five days ahead of the opening ceremony. 'There is no doubt he will be coming.'

Coates said that Evans was 'responding especially well to treatment' and that the racer was 'very keen to compete.'

Also on Sunday, the Olympic flame was paraded through a city in China's Sichuan province, nearly three months after the region was hit by a devastating earthquake that killed at least 70,000 people.

The first torch bearer in Guang'an city was Jiang Min, a local man who lost 10 members of his family in the earthquake.

'Jiang moved the hearts of all the Chinese during the recent past, standing at the front lines of relief efforts even after losing 10 loved ones to the devastating earthquake,' the organizers said.

The Olympic flame was scheduled to be taken to the city of Leshan in southern Sichuan for another relay leg on Monday.

China postponed the Sichuan legs of the torch relay and changed much of the schedule after suspending it for three days to mourn victims of the 8.0-magnitude on May 12.

About 20,000 people are still listed as missing after the earthquake in Sichuan, where several towns and villages were completely destroyed.



© Copyright The Post Publishing Public Co., Ltd. 2007"
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TECHNICAL REPORTS OF THE METEOROLOGICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE No. 62
WWRP Beijing Olympics 2008 Forecast Demonstration/
Research and Development Project (B08FDP/RDP)
BY
Kazuo Saito, Masaru Kunii, Masahiro Hara and Hiromu Seko
Tabito Hara and Munehiko Yamaguchi
Takemasa Miyoshi
and
Wai-kin Wong
http://www.mri-jma.go.jp/Publish/Technical/DATA/VOL_62/tec_rep_mri_62.pdf

Full report costs 34 MB Space.

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer STACEY SINGER
Monday, August 04, 2008


"China readies artillery to avert rain at Olympics, but some think idea's all wet

By STACEY SINGER

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Monday, August 04, 2008

As opening day for the 2008 Summer Olympics draws near, thousands of Chinese villagers are in training. Loading up artillery shells and readying rocket launchers, they await a call to arms.

The villagers aren't part of some civilian security corps. They're part of China's weather modification program. Their mission: to shoot dust into threatening clouds in advance of the opening ceremony Friday in Beijing.

Rain will not be allowed to dampen this Olympic flame.

China is home to one of the oldest, largest and most costly weather modification programs in the world.

In a presentation to climate scientists in Japan, Dr. Zhanyu Yao of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences recently described the scale of his nation's weather-changing effort: China has 37,000 people, 7,000 artillery guns and 4,700 rocket launchers in place, working in tandem with provincial leaders, meteorologists and radar stations throughout the country. It spends about $63 million a year on the program and claims a benefit worth $1.71 billion a year.

The weather modifiers slake thirsty crops, ward off damaging hail and weaken lightning storms through strategic cloud seeding, spraying dry ice, liquid nitrogen or silver iodide depending on the circumstances, he said.

The technology has been studied worldwide since the 1950s, from Russia to Saudi Arabia, and despite the difficulty of proving its effectiveness, it's still employed, with some controversy, in western states such as North Dakota and California. The debate is always whether cloud seeding made the weather, or the whims of Mother Nature did. Daniel Breed, a project scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, believes the technology can work in certain situations, but not with great precision.

'You can increase precipitation from one individual storm by as much as 50 percent,' Breed said. It's also possible to affect the size of hailstones and break up fog banks, he said.

So why hasn't Florida used it to fill up parched Lake Okeechobee or put out forest fires?

Local meteorologists say the technology is ill-suited to Florida's warmer clouds. Plus, it's expensive and fraught with liability potential.

It works best in places where the clouds lack a necessary ingredient for rain or snow: tiny particles that water molecules can grab onto.

'You can't just go out and seed clear skies and make it rain. You have to seed specific clouds at a specific time in their life,' said Geoff Shaughnessy, a senior meteorologist with the South Florida Water Management District. 'Most of the places where this works, there's a lack of condensation nuclei. Here I would think there's no shortage of aerosols, just from the salt spray and dust from Africa and pollution.'

For the Beijing Olympics, where villagers with mobile rocket launchers sit ready to shoot shells heavenward at a moment's notice, the goal isn't to increase rain, but to prevent it.

That has meteorologists and weather modifiers in the United States chuckling. The thought of being asked to seed clouds to prevent rain on Super Bowl Sunday, for example, makes them snort.

'Clouds, pesky critters that they are, you just can't steer them where you want,' said Hans Ahlness, vice president of operations at Weather Modification Inc.

His Fargo, N.D., company is working on an $8.8 million research effort to increase Wyoming's snow pack. It's an attractive prospect for utility companies that rely on hydroelectric power.

He says his planes can help pull extra rain from a nimbus cloud, on the order of 10 percent more, but they can't make a cloud appear out of thin air, nor can they stop the rain.

Breed, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, believes the Chinese scientists are in the unfortunate position of trying to placate their politicians.

'They are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place,' Breed said. 'Their scientists privately acknowledge that there really isn't any proof that they can do this kind of stuff.'

So what are the chances that it will rain in Beijing on Friday?

China's official meteorologists say there's a 50 percent chance of precipitation. The Games begin as the region's rainy season winds down.

Recalling the fate of China's former food and drug administrator, who was executed for corruption amid product safety scandals, Ahlness, at Weather Modification Inc., said his sympathies were with the Chinese scientists charged with holding the umbrella.

'I don't think I'd want to run their weather modification program,' Ahlness said. 'I hope they have clear weather just so they don't have to try anything.' "
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