Anti-hail guns for Himachal’s problem of crop damage
- Posted By
10Pointer
- Categories
Geography
- Published
7th Jun, 2021
-
Context
To help out horticulturists who face crop damage due to hailstorms, the Himachal Pradesh government will be testing the use of indigenously developed ‘anti-hail guns’.
About Anti-hail gun
- It is a machine which generates shock waves to disrupt the growth of hailstones in clouds.
- It comprises a tall, fixed structure somewhat resembling an inverted tower, several metres high, with a long and narrow cone opening towards the sky.
- An anti-hail gun generates shock waves to disrupt the growth of hailstones in clouds.
- The gun is “fired” by feeding an explosive mixture of acetylene gas and air into its lower chamber, which releases a shock wave (waves which travel faster than the speed of sound, such as those produced by supersonic aircraft).
- These shock waves supposedly stop water droplets in clouds from turning into hailstones, so that they fall simply as raindrops.
Hail
- It is produced by cumulonimbus clouds, which are generally large and dark and may cause thunder and lightning.
- In such clouds, winds can blow up the water droplets to heights where they freeze into ice.
- The frozen droplets begin to fall but are soon pushed back up by the winds and more droplets freeze onto them, resulting in multiple layers of ice on the hailstones.
- This fall and rise is repeated several times, till the hailstones become too heavy and fall down.
- Every summer from March to May, frequent hailstorms in the fruit-growing areas of Himachal destroy apples, pears and other crops, causing massive losses to farmers.
|
New guns
- The indigenous guns have been developed by IIT Bombay along with Dr Y S Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry at Nauni (Solan).
- They are expected to cost much lesser and could possibly run on LPG instead of acetylene.
