Hail Countermeasures: Hail Cannons, Etc.

[Mighty_Emperor]

Saturday, February 7, 2004

Sonic device protects Nissan inventory from hail

Generator detects conditions, fires sonic waves to disrupt formation of hailstones

By Josee Valcourt / The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger


Nissan Motor Co. incurs millions of dollars a year in hail damage to new cars parked outdoors. So when it looked like hail this week at its Canton, Miss., plant, the factory fired sonic booms into the air to break up the hail before it could reach the ground.

Nissan says it’s the first automaker in the United States to use the hail-protection generator, which has been used by farmers to protect crops for more than a decade.

The machine is designed to protect the fleet of new vehicles placed daily in the shipping yard, said Wendy Polk, a spokeswoman for Nissan.

“Over the past years, Nissan has incurred literally millions of dollars from hail damage. At any moment we can have several thousand vehicles in our shipping yard,” she said. “This is a way to protect our investment by preventing damage to vehicles ready to be shipped.”

The hail protection generator detects when conditions make hail possible. It automatically fires sonic waves into the atmosphere, disrupting the formation of hailstones within a one-mile radius.

“The sonic waves continue every five seconds until the weather condition has changed,” said Polk, who would not release the cost of the machine.

“We could hear the sound all morning,” said Gale Constable, owner of a boathouse about eight miles from the plant. “It was so annoying.”

Constable described it as a thumping sound that left her with a throbbing headache.

The plant did not receive phone calls from residents inquiring about the noise coming from the generator, Polk said, but the company plans to install an abatement fence to deaden its booming sound.

http://www.detnews.com/2004/autosinsider/0402/07/autos-57670.htm

 

[_schnor]

Mercedes use a very similar technique, by seeding clouds before they pass over their massive outdoor carpark, all in preference to building a large garage

 

[Anonymous]

u'd think a roof would be cheeper ah!.... think of all those car alarms going off at once !

 

[Philo_T]

You'd think a Reichian cloudbuster or some sort of Keely-esque harmonic disruptor would annoy the neighbors less. But then again DOR poisoning or exploding housepets would probably have them up at your gate with pitchforks and torches. Damn NIMBY enviromentalists, always holding back Progress!

 

[Mama_Kitty]

Say no to hailstorm suppressors! Do they not realise that some of us are desperate to find bigger and bigger hailstones? How are we supposed to get dramatic footage of huge dents in cars if they blimmin well ruin all the good hailstorms?

 

[mejane]

Farmers protecting crops I can understand, but aren't cars big metal things unlike, say, cornstalks? How much damage can hail do?

Jane.

 

[filcee]

Farmers protecting crops I can understand, but aren't cars big metal things unlike, say, cornstalks? How much damage can hail do?

Jane.

Hailstorms can do quite a bit of damage, as shown in this picture of a post hail storm forecourt, and this car . It's not just cars , houses can be damaged, too.

 

[Wreckless]

by Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/23/2018 - 10:45

With a headline torn straight from a futurist global dysphoria movie, The FT reports that Volkswagen is reversing course on the use of controversial weather-altering technology at a major Mexican car plant after local farmers complained that the system caused drought by preventing rainfall.

Hail storms present significant problems for car manufacturers, which often have large numbers of finished vehicles parked outsideat distribution centers or plants.

The German carmaker had installed hail cannons, which fire shockwaves into the atmosphere, at its Puebla site to prevent the formation of ice stones that had been damaging finished vehicles parked outside its facility.

However, as The FT reports, local farmers said the devices, which were set to fire automatically under certain weather conditions, caused a drought during the months that should have been Mexico’s rainy season.

Gerardo Perez, a farmers’ representative in the area, told the AFP agency that the cannons meant the “sky literally clears and it simply doesn’t rain."

A spokesman for VW said on Wednesday that the company would immediately suspend the use of the machines in automatic mode, following meetings with state authorities this week.

“Once the anti-hail nets are installed in the yards, they will be used as the main measure for the protection of vehicles, while the devices will serve as a secondary tool and will only be used in manual mode,” he added.

“With these actions, Volkswagen de México expresses its commitment to maintain sustainable relationships with its stakeholders: environment, neighbouring communities and authorities.”

In case you're wondering how an anti-hail cannon works...

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-23/volkswagen-trouble-altering-mexicos-weather

 

[ramonmercado]

Something to whine about.

Bordeaux wine producers had in place an elaborate system to protect their vines from hail: a network of cannon that generate shock waves to limit the formation of big hailstones.

Château owners have now expressed anger after it failed when storms hit the region. Vineyard proprietors watched aghast as hailstones “the size of pigeons’ eggs” bypassed the protective system to damage swathes of vines during what has been described as the fiercest storms in the region in decades.

Some châteaux say that all their vines were wrecked in the storms on Friday and Saturday. The hail came after frost damaged vines across French winemaking regions this month, and amid a coronavirus epidemic that has led to a slump in sales so great that there are calls for cheap wines to be transformed into industrial alcohol.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/anti-hail-cannon-fail-to-protect-vineyards-m06lwv0ss