The South African rainfall enhancement programme: 1997-2001

Abstract

This paper provides a summary of the South African Rainfall Enhancement Programme (SAREP) that was conducted in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. SAREP included an operational cloud-seeding campaign based on the South African developed hygroscopic flare-seeding technology which ran from December 1997 to the end of December 2000. In addition, a radar-based storm climatology was compiled using data collected during the period October 2000 to April 2001. During the cloud-seeding campaign 95 storms were seeded of which 37 were selected for treatment early in their lifetimes. This subset allowed a ‘time of origin’ analysis to quantify the seeding effect on radar-estimated rainfall. The Thunderstorm Identification Tracking Analyses and Nowcasting (TITAN) software was upgraded as part of SAREP for such an analysis. It was found that seeded storms on average produced twice the radar-determined rainfall that their controls produced. The cost for the additional rainfall was determined to be about R0.04/m 3.

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