Artificial rain has been used for the first time in Pakistan in a bid to combat hazardous levels of pollution in the\u00a0megacity of Lahore, says the provincial government.<\/p>\n
Planes equipped with cloud-seeding equipment flew on Saturday over the eastern city, often ranked\u00a0one of the worst places\u00a0globally for air pollution.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt drizzled in at least 10 areas of Lahore,\u201d caretaker chief minister of Punjab, Mohsin Naqvi, told reporters, adding that the authorities were monitoring the impact of artificial rain in a radius of 15km (nine miles).<\/p>\n
Air quality in Lahore has been\u00a0particularly bad\u00a0in the last few weeks and the Punjab government employed several tactics including the early closure of businesses and keeping schools off for two extra days to help improve the air quality \u2013 but nothing worked.<\/p>\n
The \u201cgift\u201d was provided by the United Arab Emirates, Naqvi said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTeams from the UAE, along with two planes, arrived here about 10 to 12 days ago. They used 48 flares to create the rain,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Naqvi said the team would be able to assess the effects of the experiment by Saturday night.<\/p>\n
The UAE has increasingly used cloud seeding, sometimes referred to as artificial rain or blueskying, to create rain in the arid expanse of the country.<\/p>\n
In the cloud-seeding process, silver iodide, a yellowish salt, is burned in clouds in a compound with acetone to encourage condensation to form as rain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Artificial rain has been used for the first time in Pakistan in a bid to combat hazardous levels of pollution in the\u00a0megacity of Lahore, says the provincial government. Planes equipped with cloud-seeding equipment flew on Saturday over the eastern city, often ranked\u00a0one of the worst places\u00a0globally for air pollution. \u201cIt drizzled in at least 10 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,8],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"category-punjab"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/lahor-2-1702745563.webp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakpolitics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}