Weather Control tech

[FaxModem1]

How good is it in the Federation, I know it makes Beverly's planet like Ireland and Risa a paradise, and that's the only two examples I can think of, and are there any others?

[TheDarkling]

Ireland

What is it with people confusing Scotland and Ireland?

[FaxModem1]

Sorry, been a long time since I've watched the episode.

[Deathstalker]

Earth is weather controlled. The Q had a tornado wipe out some defecting Q iirc, and I think Data commented that the tornado had gotten past the weather controls.

[The Silence and I]

I don't remember this episode...at all
Which one was this?

[Crazedwraith]

I don't remember this episode...at all
Which one was this?

The one with Amana Rodgers, "True Q" IIRC.

[Trogdor]

I'd say the Feds are pretty good at it, and have been for a while, since the weather control tech at that planet was supposed to be really old but still worked fine until the ghost alien started screwing with it.

Hmm, weather control tech could make for interesting weapons. Surrender or be tornadoed/hurricaned/flooded!

[RedImperator]

Is it outright weather control, or just modification? If I recall correctly, it's the latter. It might be able to moderate extremes and do things like break up supercells before they spawn tornadoes, but I've never seen anything that proves they can do things like control the weather day to day.

[General Zod]

Is it outright weather control, or just modification? If I recall correctly, it's the latter. It might be able to moderate extremes and do things like break up supercells before they spawn tornadoes, but I've never seen anything that proves they can do things like control the weather day to day.

it might be control. iirc when worf, bashir and jadzia went on vacation to risa and some fundamentalist nut hijacked the weather satellites, he shut them down and the place went from tropical paradise with no cloud in the sky to rainy mudhole in the space of hours.

[RedImperator]

Is it outright weather control, or just modification? If I recall correctly, it's the latter. It might be able to moderate extremes and do things like break up supercells before they spawn tornadoes, but I've never seen anything that proves they can do things like control the weather day to day.

it might be control. iirc when worf, bashir and jadzia went on vacation to risa and some fundamentalist nut hijacked the weather satellites, he shut them down and the place went from tropical paradise with no cloud in the sky to rainy mudhole in the space of hours.

That doesn't prove anything. It could be the chaos of the climate crashing back to its natural equilibrium from the artificial state the satellites kept it in.

[Gil Hamilton]

I thought they made the satillites cause it to storm in that episode.

[TheDarkling]

I thought they made the satillites cause it to storm in that episode.

No, the natural state of Risa (or most of it at least) is near constant rain, when they switched off the grid things returned to that state.

They used the tectonic regulators to cause the Earthquakes though.

[Biddybot]

How, exactly, that weather control/modification is supposed to work is what I'd like to know. To make rain, for example, you need clouds. And to make clouds you'd need a lifting agency (ie. daytime heating), lots of water vapour, and lots of nuclei for that water vapour to condense onto. The amount of equipment and/or energy required to modify any one of those factors to any appreciable level kind of boggles my mind (not to mention sounding rather dangerous if you're going to try and screw around with supplemental heating to try and get some instability going).

Creating 'good' weather by topping off clouds before they could become rain-makers would be a little easier to manage, but still, the scope required boggles.

A lot of the alien planets they visit in the Trek series must have managed to overcome these problems, however, since our heroes sure seem to luck onto a lot of fair weather when they do their visiting...

[Darth Wong]

Hey, it's Biddybot!

[Patrick Degan]

How, exactly, that weather control/modification is supposed to work is what I'd like to know. To make rain, for example, you need clouds. And to make clouds you'd need a lifting agency (ie. daytime heating), lots of water vapour, and lots of nuclei for that water vapour to condense onto. The amount of equipment and/or energy required to modify any one of those factors to any appreciable level kind of boggles my mind (not to mention sounding rather dangerous if you're going to try and screw around with supplemental heating to try and get some instability going).

Creating 'good' weather by topping off clouds before they could become rain-makers would be a little easier to manage, but still, the scope required boggles.

A lot of the alien planets they visit in the Trek series must have managed to overcome these problems, however, since our heroes sure seem to luck onto a lot of fair weather when they do their visiting...

This month's issue of Scientific American features an article about the timely subject of hurricanes and a brief discussion of theoretical methods to either damp their intensity or alter their courses. One method mentioned involves the use of satellites to focus microwave beams onto a particular area of ocean, heating the water and thereby creating a zone which would draw a hurricane system from its present pathway and toward the patch of heated ocean.

Of course, it all depends upon the capacity to predict through chaos mechanics the development of a storm and its most probable track days or weeks in advance, which in the present day is not at all a certain exercise and thus puts a rather big caveat on any of the methods discussed in the article.

[Darth Wong]

The fact that we always see sunny weather when people are walking around on Earth is not proof that it always looks like that. We haven't actually been on Earth that often in the history of Star Trek, and even if you did have a virtually omnipotent weather control system, you would still want it to rain on a regular basis in order to keep forests healthy, grass green, etc. It would be the height of insanity to somehow prevent all rain via artificial means and then be forced to artificially irrigate everything, including natural forests. Would you even want to live on a world with no rain or snow? I sure as hell wouldn't want to go the rest of my life never experiencing rain, snow, or a windy day.

[Patrick Degan]

The fact that we always see sunny weather when people are walking around on Earth is not proof that it always looks like that. We haven't actually been on Earth that often in the history of Star Trek, and even if you did have a virtually omnipotent weather control system, you would still want it to rain on a regular basis in order to keep forests healthy, grass green, etc. It would be the height of insanity to somehow prevent all rain via artificial means and then be forced to artificially irrigate everything, including natural forests. Would you even want to live on a world with no rain or snow? I sure as hell wouldn't want to go the rest of my life never experiencing rain, snow, or a windy day.

Indeed. Weather control with the object of creating the "perfect" planet-wide environment would not only be devestating in the long-term but would constitute an increasingly complex and difficult engineering exercise, because you'd be essentially neutralising the natural climatological processes of the entire planet. I could see weather control to the extent of diverting or damping potentially destructive storm systems to reduce the damage inflicted on civilised areas, but for any other purpose it would be insane.

Take hurricanes for example. Destructive to property and lives, yes. But they are part of the ocean's temperature regulation mechanism and the process which drives river drainage, landbuilding, and irrigation of the southeastern United States. Without hurricanes, the southeastern states would be in drought for periods of years at a stretch. And that's the disaster shutting off that process would entail.

[Biddybot]

I wouldn't want to live anywhere that doesn't experience the four seasons, let alone live where the weather's invariably 'good'--that kind of climate would just bore me to tears. Of course I may change my mind about this in another 20 or 30 years, when I'm truly ancient and getting a little too creaky to shovel snow or mow the lawn anymore...

I've read about the heating the ocean surface plan before, but am not entirely sure what this is supposed to accomplish...it's the upper level winds that steer most weather of note, and I'd worry about generating warmth and moisture that would simply wind up augmenting a developing hurricane, rather than serving to disorganize its flow patterns. Arbitrarily heating up a section of the ocean surface also strikes me as showing an appalling lack of concern for the kazillions of creatures that happen to live in said water, but that's just my opinion.

Heating up a layer of air at altitude--creating an artificial inversion layer, basically--seems a somewhat safer route if you want to start screwing with temperatures. I can envision something like this being used to top off selected cumulus-type clouds at, say, 20 to 25 thousand feet, enough for them to rain themselves out without developing into the dangerous storms that spawn tornadoes and large hail. Dunno if you could realistically zap a large enough area to check a developing tropical depression, though...

(PS to Darth Wong: Yes! Imagine my surprise when my *%$@@! computer not only let me log on, but actually post a message! It's still locking up after about 10 pages, though. Getting out of Internet Explorer, then restarting it, seems to refresh my allotment, so I can live with it for now and hopefully participate a bit again instead of just lurking...)

[Darth Wong]

(PS to Darth Wong: Yes! Imagine my surprise when my *%$@@! computer not only let me log on, but actually post a message! It's still locking up after about 10 pages, though. Getting out of Internet Explorer, then restarting it, seems to refresh my allotment, so I can live with it for now and hopefully participate a bit again instead of just lurking...)

You might want to try Firefox (not to mention the usual things like scanning for adware and viruses, checking your HD for filesystem errors, etc).

[Biddybot]

Darth Wong: Sadly, I will be trying exactly nothing to improve matters because I'm still using the computer at work which has mega-security features and restrictions on it. It wasn't that long ago that I didn't have Internet access, period, so I'm not planning on complaining, either.

But hey, this is great compared to what happened with another board I used to post on! THAT one now flags a big red RESTRICTED/ACCESS PROHIBITED if I try to even bring it up. (Someone over there must've been a bad boy or girl...)

Coincidently, the movie TWISTER is just finishing up in the background as I type this. If a weather modification plan ever flies for real, I sincerely hope that they get better caliber meteorologists than the ones featured in that silly movie!

[TrailerParkJawa]

The fact that we always see sunny weather when people are walking around on Earth is not proof that it always looks like that. We haven't actually been on Earth that often in the history of Star Trek, and even if you did have a virtually omnipotent weather control system, you would still want it to rain on a regular basis in order to keep forests healthy, grass green, etc. It would be the height of insanity to somehow prevent all rain via artificial means and then be forced to artificially irrigate everything, including natural forests. Would you even want to live on a world with no rain or snow? I sure as hell wouldn't want to go the rest of my life never experiencing rain, snow, or a windy day.

Think of all the wild animals you'd end up killing if it never rained or snowed. There'd be no water in the streams for salmon. Cold weather animals would go extinct. Desert animals would go extinct. I think the weather control they speak of is more likely used to prevent death and destruction than to really create a 74 degree utopia.

[TheDarkling]

We have seen rain on Earth, in the alternate future with old Jake.

[Alyeska]

Something else to consider. In the episode where warp damage is talked about weath control technology is again mentioned. This time it was considered a temporary means to fix problems caused on the planet that resided in the passage.