Modeling the impact of cloud seeding to rescind the effect of atmospheric pollutants on natural rainfall

Abstract

Water is an essential element for life on the planet Earth, which comes on the Earth naturally through precipitation. Continuous increase in human population has diminished the open land water sources and increased surface water pollution as well as atmospheric pollution. The increasing human population and the presence of atmospheric pollutants affect the natural formation of cloud droplets and their conversion into raindrops, respectively, and thus results in rainfall suppression, as observed in the last few decades. In this study, we formulate a nonlinear mathematical model to assess the influence of artificially introduced conducive aerosols in the regional atmosphere through a weather modification technique ‘cloud-seeding’ for rainfall enhancement to rescind the effect of atmospheric pollutants on natural rainfall. In the modeling phenomenon, it is assumed that atmospheric pollutants reduce the condensation and nucleation processes of cloud droplets to form raindrops, but the introduction of conducive aerosols in the regional atmosphere increases the condensation and nucleation processes of cloud droplets, thus increases the formation of raindrops. The local as well as global stability behavior of the feasible equilibria are discussed, and sensitivity analysis is performed for the key parameters. Along with the analytical findings, the numerical simulation is presented to corroborate the obtained analytical findings. The model analysis provides some interesting results to overcome rainfall suppression. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.