The first scientiffic evidence for the hail cannon

Abstract

The hail cannon has been used to prevent hail storms since the 19th century. The idea of the hail cannon is to create a sequence of shock waves to prevent the formation of clouds before the hail storm. Modern hail cannons employ a mixture of acetylene and oxygen to ignite a sequence of explosions in the lower chamber traveling through the neck and into the cone of the cannon, creating shock waves. The shock waves propagate upwards to the cloud, and they are supposed to prevent the formation of the cloud. According to Wikipedia, there is no scientific evidence for the hail cannon, even though it is commonly used in several countries. In this paper, we propose a numerical simulation to verify the idea of the hail cannon. We employ isogeometric analysis and variational splitting methods. We compare our numerical results with the experimental data. We show that our numerical simulation is indeed the scientific evidence for the hail cannon. We also compare our numerical simulations with the experimental measurements performed with a drone before and after a sequence of generated shock waves.