On December 22, Russia celebrates the Day of the Hydrometeorological Service of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. It was on this day in 1915 that a decision was made to form the Main Military Meteorological Directorate (GVMU), headed by B. B. Golitsyn. Almost a hundred years later, the meteorological service is not just an indispensable tool in the service of the army, but one of the key areas that is actively developing.
On the front lines
On December 28, 1899, in Tiflis, a young Georgian Iosif Dzhugashvili walked briskly along the street of David the Builder. He was looking for house # 150, which housed the geophysical observatory. It was impossible to be late. Dzhugashvili went to get a job as a computer observer. Joseph was hired to work.
Dzhugashvili was engaged in meteorological observations for exactly 98 days. His duties included hourly rounds of all instruments that measured the air temperature, monitoring cloud cover, wind and air pressure. The observer computer entered all the results into notebooks specially designed for this. Dzhugashvili preferred night shifts, which began in the evening, at half past eight, and lasted until eight in the morning.
The salary of the calculator-observer Dzhugashvili was quite good money at that time - 20 rubles a month. But on March 21, 1901, Joseph resigned. Another fate awaited him. In 44 years, an ordinary meteorologist at the Tiflis Geophysical Observatory will become the Generalissimo of the Soviet Union. And in 1941 the first units of military meteorologists will appear in the USSR.
The Great Patriotic War required the inclusion of the USSR Hydrometeorological Service in the country's Armed Forces. The troops needed absolutely accurate weather forecasts for the timing of combat operations. And now on July 15, 1941, the Main Directorate of the Hydrometeorological Service of the Red Army was created - GUGMS KA.
From the first days of the war, the opposing sides classified their broadcast weather reports. For this, it used its own meteorological code. At the slightest suspicion that the numbers were intercepted and decrypted by the enemy, the code was immediately changed. The weather data became a true military secret. The synoptic map became a kind of mirror reflecting the situation on the front line.
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The designers with the direct participation of the Hydrometeorological Service employees in an incredibly short time created a compact weather station, consisting of two small suitcases. The one-of-a-kind amphibious automatic radio meteorological stations were delivered by aviation to the German rear and four times a day were automatically “broadcast”, sprinkling signals over a distance of several hundred kilometers and thus giving reliable information about the weather on the flight routes.
The forecast of non-flying weather for German aviation made it possible to conduct the parade on Red Square on November 7, 1941. The use of knowledge of the snow cover passability for tanks during the defense of Moscow made it possible to determine the timing of the start of the counteroffensive in November-December 1941. The forecast of a sharp cold snap in November- December 1941 gave rise to a successful counteroffensive by the troops of the Southern Front.
Implementation of ice breaking by artificial flood on the Moscow, which turned it into a serious water barrier, made it possible to stop the German offensive north of Moscow. Hydrometeorological support played an important role in the creation and successful operation of the famous "Road of Life" on the ice of Lake Ladoga.
However, after the end of World War II, almost nothing was heard about military meteorologists until April 26, 1986.
Chernobyl cloud
The first attempts to change the weather were made in the middle of the last century. First, Soviet scientists learned how to dispel fog in 15-20 minutes, then - to cope with dangerous hail clouds. After special treatment, a harmless downpour came from the cloud.
The breakthrough came in the mid-60s, when for the first time scientists managed to induce artificial precipitation. The usual-looking clouds made it rain. In the mid-1980s, an industrial technology for active influence on meteorological processes was developed.
In the language of military meteorologists, active influence on the phase state of clouds by various substances is called the agronomic term "cloud seeding". In fact, this process is somewhat similar to an agricultural one, only a plane is used as a traction unit, not a horse or a tractor.
After the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the use of military aviation in the fight against radioactive rain clouds on the outskirts of Chernobyl consisted in spraying inside the clouds, or at a small height above them (50-100 meters), special anti-rain, powdery mixtures.
One of the main substances that was used to destroy clouds was ordinary cement of grade 600. Cement, which was sprayed from the open compartment of the AN-12BP "Cyclone" by hand (with a shovel, or thrown out 30-kg packages), was also used in a mixture with other reagents … For the entire period of use of AN-12BP "Cyclone" about nine tons of cement were consumed.
After Chernobyl, the experience of dispersing rain clouds began to be actively used on Victory Day on May 9. Every year, in order to avoid rain during festive events, military meteorologists conduct special operations in the skies over Moscow and the Moscow region.
Holiday "without rain in the eyes"
The spraying technology itself is quite simple and does not require much investment. For example, a 5 km cloud requires only 15 grams. reagent. Military meteorologists call the process of dispersing clouds "seeding". Dry ice is sprayed against the layered forms of the lower cloud layer from a height of several thousand meters, and liquid nitrogen is sprayed against the stratus cloudiness. The most powerful rain clouds are bombarded with silver iodide, which is stuffed with meteo cartridges.
Getting into them, the reagent particles concentrate moisture around them, pulling it out of the clouds. As a result, heavy rain begins almost immediately over the area where dry ice or silver iodide is sprayed. On the way to Moscow, the clouds will have used up all their "ammunition" and dispersed. The reagent exists in the atmosphere for less than a day. After entering the cloud, it is washed out of it along with precipitation.
Acceleration tactics are developed in the last days before the holidays. Early in the morning, aerial reconnaissance clarifies the situation, after which planes with reagents on board take off from one of the (usually military) airfields near Moscow.
The cost of such flights can reach several million rubles, depending on the flight time and the consumption of expensive fuel. According to rough estimates, one fair weather event costs the city treasury a total of $ 2.5 million. The decision to use aviation is made each time by the Air Force Commander-in-Chief.
Training of military meteorologists
Today, it must be admitted, there are only a few educational institutions that train military specialists in the field of meteorology. One of the universities in which the hydrometeorological faculty has survived is the Voronezh Aviation Engineering School (or the Voronezh Aviation Engineering University).
In it you can get officer shoulder straps in the specialty "Meteorology". Moreover, this specialty extends not only to aviation, but also to other types and types of troops. Military meteorology remains one of the key areas, which is also actively developing.
Climatic Weapons: Object Sura and American HAARP
Currently, the RF Ministry of Defense has a subdivision called the Hydrometeorological Service of the RF Armed Forces. It provides all departments of the Ministry of Defense with the necessary information about climatic conditions anywhere in the world.
The foreign media more than once reported that the Sura Object belongs to the Hydrometeorological Service of the Russian Defense Ministry. Moreover, Russia has been repeatedly credited with using, in particular, against the United States, the so-called climate weapon. And all the hurricanes, typhoons and floods of recent years, allegedly, were provoked by the Sura station.
In 2005, American meteorologist Scott Stevens accused Russia of creating the devastating hurricane Katrina. The element was allegedly provoked by a secret "weather" weapon based on the principle of an electromagnetic generator. According to Stevens, secret installations have been developed in Russia since Soviet times that can have a detrimental effect on the weather anywhere in the world.
This news was instantly spread by the American press. “It has been established that in the 60s and 70s the former Soviet Union developed and took pride in weather modification technologies that have been used against the United States since 1976,” the meteorologist argued. How far from the truth was he?
The weather modification technologies that Stevens spoke about did take place and were created at the mysterious Sura base, in deep forests, 150 kilometers from Nizhny Novgorod. An old stone road, a former Siberian tract, leads to the landfill. She rests against a shabby brick gatehouse with a sign at the entrance: "Here in 1833 Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin passed." The poet then headed east to collect material about the Pugachev uprising.
On an area of 9 hectares, there are even rows of 20-meter antennas, overgrown with bushes from below. In the center of the antenna field there is a huge horn-emitter the size of a village hut. It is used to study acoustic processes in the atmosphere. At the edge of the field there is a building of radio transmitters and a transformer substation, a little in the distance - a laboratory and a utility building.
The base was built in the late 70s. and was commissioned in 1981. Only they were not engaged in the creation of "climatic" weapons. This completely unique setup yielded extremely interesting results on the behavior of the ionosphere, including the discovery of the effect of generation of low-frequency radiation during modulation of ionospheric currents. Subsequently, they were named after the founder of the stand the Getmantsev effect.
In the early 1980s, when the Sura was just beginning to be used, interesting anomalous phenomena were observed in the atmosphere above it: strange glow, burning red balls hanging motionless or rushing in the sky at high speed. It turned out that these were the luminescent glow of plasma formations. As scientists now admit, these experiments had a military purpose and were developed with the aim of disrupting the location and radio communications of a conventional enemy. Those plasma formations that were created by installations in the ionosphere could "jam", for example, American early warning systems for missile launches.
However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such studies were no longer carried out. Now "Sura" works only about 100 hours a year. In fact, the development of "weather weapons" is now being actively pursued in the United States. The most famous of these projects is the HAARP project.
In America, under the guise of a global missile defense project carried out under the HAARP program for a comprehensive study of radio frequency effects on the ionosphere, the development of plasma weapons has begun. In accordance with it, in Alaska, at the Gakona test site, a powerful radar complex was built - a huge antenna field with an area of 13 hectares. Antennas directed to the zenith will allow focusing short-wave radiation pulses on separate sections of the ionosphere and heating them up to the formation of a temperature plasma. Its radiation power is many times higher than that of the sun.
In fact, HAARP is a colossal microwave oven, whose radiation can be focused anywhere in the world, thereby causing various natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, heat, etc.), as well as various man-made disasters (disrupt radio communications over large areas, worsen the accuracy of satellite navigation, "blind radars", create accidents in power grids, on the lines of gas and oil pipelines of entire regions, etc.), affect the consciousness and psyche of people.
Author: Oleg Goryunov