Vietnam rejects proposal to seed clouds for Hanoi anniversary

Aug 13, 2010, 7:19 GMT

Hanoi - Vietnam has rejected a proposal by the city of Hanoi to seed clouds to prevent rainfall during the city's 1000th anniversary celebrations in October, an official said Friday.

City officials, worried that rain would mar the festivities, had planned to seed clouds outside the city, at a reported cost of more than 1 billion dollars.

'Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Sinh Hung directed the Hanoi People's Committee to cancel this plan because it is so expensive,' said Ho Thi Dung, deputy head of a government committee organizing the celebrations.

In cloud seeding, aircraft or rockets disperse chemicals into cloud formations to induce precipitation, in this case to prevent the rain going on to fall elsewhere.

Duong Trung Quoc, a deputy in Vietnam's National Assembly, said the plan was a waste of money.

'Because the country is poor, the plan to spend so much money should be condemned,' Quoc said. 'Our ancestors will be happy even if it rains, knowing that all that money didn't go up in clouds and smoke.'

But meteorologist Tran Duy Binh said the costs of the plan had been greatly exaggerated, the newspaper Dat Viet reported Thursday.

A cloud-seeding trial in 2000 cost just 500,000 dollars, Binh said. The cost of China's cloud-seeding during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 was in the millions of dollars, according to press reports at the time.

Countries such as China and Australia seed clouds to instigate rainfall in dry regions.

Cloud seeding occasionally goes awry. In November 2009, Chinese authorities seeded clouds outside Beijing in an attempt to ease a drought, but when temperatures dropped, the precipitation fell as snow.

The resulting 11-hour snowstorm delayed air traffic and brought the city to a standstill.