Summary
October 17, 2009: The Mayor of Moscow (a city infamous for its severe winter weather) has announced a Weather Control plan to prevent all but the lightest of snows this winter. The Russian Airforce, always tight for cash, has been contracted to seed the clouds and make the snow fall out of them outside city limits. It sounds like a crazy plan, but the fact is that the same technology is already used by Moscow to keep the skies clear on the big parades for Victory Day and City Day every year. In fact, it is believed the cost to the city will only be $6 million dollars, which is about half what the city pays each year for plowing and related snow services.
The clouds will be seeded with cement powder, dry ice or silver iodide. Environmentalist groups are seeking a delay of the plan until a proper scientific study can be conducted, and people living in rural and suburban areas near Moscow (who would be buried under the snow that falls out) want it prevented as well.
Source
Game and Story Use
- Twenty Minutes Into The Future, it has become common for large cities to pay Megacorps and Cyberpunk Military groups to keep their weather nice, at the expense of poorer communities just upwind of them.
- Returning from a mission, the PCs are stuck in a small community, buried under the snows caused by the PCs hometown. They're snowed in, and have to fend with rationing and scavenging. Plus, if the locals find out where they're from, there may be vigilante reprisals.
- Decades from now, the bizarre accumulation of cloud seeding has toxic or unpredicted affects. Note that what I'm proposing is pure speculation:
- Years of accumulated cement powder has left a crust over the earth, and, between it and the ridiculous snow levels, completely destroyed local agriculture.
- Silver Iodide accumulates in local lakes and rivers. It's lattice structure interacts with water to cause it to form thin sheets of ice at room temperature. You have lakes that are slushy or even frozen year-round despite warm weather.
- The carbon dioxide gas accumulation from decades of dry ice seeding could result in mass asphyxiation, and/or increased global warming.
- The city that avoids snowfall in the winter experience a drought as a result of not having run-off. They have no one to blame but themselves their mayor.
- If done on a large enough scale, this could move a noticeable volume of water from one watershed to another, with all sorts of problems downstream, not including the added requirements for run-off where the snowfall melts.