Moscow's mercurial mayor, famous for seeding clouds to prevent rain during parades, is escalating his war on the weather with plans to slash this year's snowfall by one-fifth in the Russian capital.
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov will marshal the Russian air force and air defense systems to intercept storm fronts and hit them with dry ice and silver iodine particles, city officials said.
The idea is to reduce the amount of snow that clogs Moscow's frigid streets and costs the city millions to manage. Instead, the snow would be dumped on villages and satellite towns far from Moscow -- which Luzhkov reportedly suggested would help crops in surrounding regions.
The initiative could cost $6 million, but the city hopes to save $10 million in snow removal, Moscow public works chief Andrei Tsybin said Wednesday, according to the state-run ITAR-Tass news agency. City officials declined to comment Friday on details of the plan.
Moscow has been hard hit by the worldwide recession, and city officials suggested that the anti-snow effort -- to run from mid-November to March -- would help Moscow bring its budget under control.
"If it works out, Chicago or Montreal may want to copy us," said Kremlin-linked lawmaker Sergei Markov, who like Luzhkov belongs to the dominant United Russia party.
Philip Brown, cloud physics research manager at the British national weather service, said the idea is relatively untested. "A lot of work has been done with cloud seeding in terms of trying to enhance rainfall, but I'm not aware of any studies in the scientific literature that have been done for the purpose of snow limiting," he said.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
