Jakarta (ANTARA) – Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) is supporting scientific evaluations of efforts to combat wildfire haze through weather-modification operations using dry ice.
Florentinus Heru Widodo, a principal engineer at BRIN’s Research Center for Limnology and Water Resources, said here Monday that an integrated team was testing dry ice, or solid carbon dioxide.
Unlike cloud seeding, which aims to increase the chance of rain from suitable clouds, dry ice is being tested to determine whether it can alter temperatures in an atmospheric inversion layer.
“Dry ice has a temperature of about minus 78.5 degrees Celsius. When released into the atmosphere, it sublimates, changing from a solid to a gas while absorbing heat from its surroundings,” he said.
Conceptually, Heru said, this localized cooling could affect differences in air temperature and density, trigger local air movement, and increase vertical air mixing.
If the changes are substantial and atmospheric conditions are favorable, the inversion layer could weaken, allowing air to move more freely and potentially supporting cloud development.
“Dry ice may create localized cooling and affect atmospheric stability in the inversion layer. But this remains a hypothesis. We must test whether the changes can weaken the inversion and support cloud growth,” he said.
Heru cautioned that inversion layers can cover broad areas and vary in stability, so a temperature disturbance at one location may not be enough to change atmospheric conditions more widely.
He said the method’s effectiveness cannot be established from the proposed cooling mechanism alone; it must be demonstrated through atmospheric observations and data analysis.
To assess the operation, Heru said, BRIN can analyze atmospheric observations collected by the operating agencies and Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG).
The data include vertical temperature profiles, humidity, the height and thickness of inversion layers, and other measures of atmospheric stability.
Researchers can use radiosonde readings, which provide information on temperature, humidity, and other meteorological conditions at different altitudes.
Temperature measurements collected during flights can also help identify inversion layers and estimate their thickness.
Observations taken systematically before, during, and after seeding are needed to document and compare any changes in atmospheric conditions.
Heru said this approach is important because the effectiveness of weather-modification technology depends heavily on atmospheric conditions during an operation.
“We need a strong scientific basis for every disaster-response technology. Observational data are key to determining whether treatment affects the inversion layer or whether other weather dynamics explain the changes,” Heru said.
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Translator: Sean FM, Rahmad Nasution
Editor: Azis Kurmala
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