China fired over a thousand rockets into the sky last week at the climax of its efforts to ensure a rain free opening ceremony for the Olympic games. No rain fell during the ceremony, although some showers disrupted other events.

“We fired a total of 1,104 rain dispersal rockets from 21 sites in the city between 4 pm and 11.39 pm on Friday, which successfully intercepted a stretch of rain belt from moving towards the stadium,” Guo Hu, head of the Beijing Municipal Meteorological Bureau, told state news service Xinhua.

The NY Times has reporter George Vecsey on the scene. As well as worrying about misuse of weather modification by US baseball teams he says:

Meanwhile, the weather forecast is for storms Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There is muddy scum on sidewalks and streets – from the skies, not the ground – but street cleaners come by and clean it up, and workers mop the entrances to the Water Cube.

On Sunday night, polite young workers stood outside the south entrance of of the main press center and smiled and told people in English, “Watch your step” before the slippery marble entrance. The young people took umbrellas from soaked guests and shook them out and put them in plastic bags. What hath the rockets wrought?

Wang Wei, a vice president of the Chinese Olympic organizing committee, said Sunday’s rain was natural (AP). But the weather-modifiers are apparently considering making it rain to wash out pollution (Independent).

One of the problems facing Beijing, atmospheric scientist Kenneth Rahn told AP, is that loads of the city’s pollution comes from neighbouring provinces. If China wants to clean up the pollution, says Rahn, “They better pray to the Mongolian rain gods.”

Wired notes that atmospheric scientist V. Ram Ramanathan is expoloiting Beijing’s shutdown of industry and traffic to do some atmospheric science. He’s sending his snazzy team of aerial drones (which graced the cover of Nature last year) up into pollution clouds to see what the shutdown is doing.

“We have a huge and unprecedented opportunity to observe a large reduction in everyday emissions from a region that’s very industrially active,” says Ramanathan.

Image: stock photo / getty