English → Arabic transcript

If you could fire a laser at the sky and make it rain, oh that sounds more interesting. Dave Malkoff explains. Just another stormy wet afternoon in central Florida, but what if you could pick up all this rain and move it where it's needed? Texas or California, what if a laser could start the rain? So you can almost use it to set it off. Matt Mills got into lasers as a kid, it's just innately cool.

Now he's part of a team of scientists and military backers on the cutting edge of a new technology, making lasers powerful enough to reach up here into the sky where a thunderstorm is just about to start. In the near future, a push button storm starter could be a real thing. Just imagining this situation, if there was a rain cloud that was going to pass over an area of drought and not rain, then you could theoretically induce the rain and get the rain where it's needed.

That storm starter isn't the laser beam itself, but rather a popping energy that comes off of much higher power beams than this one. The problem is those pops have always had trouble getting into the sky. Now Matt has discovered a way to get the laser to pop all the way in the clouds. In theory, that's what starts a storm. We created a cloud of our own behind Matt's lab.

A few months ago, Matt's colleagues in Arizona got this working experimentally. The next step is to get it to work in the sky. The particles in the air are rubbing together, forming static electricity, and the conditions are now right. And they just need to be triggered now. Does this concern you, that you may be messing with Mother Nature

and doing something that you don't completely understand up here in the cloud? I suppose that's always a danger, but we're not even near to the case where it could be dangerous yet, so not too much. It's almost like an on-off switch for a thunderstorm. That's the idea behind it. Right here in the cloud.

In Orlando, Dave Malkoff, The Weather Channel. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology