Gov't to set up center for weather control

A national command center for weather modification will be built before 2010 to coordinate the practices of rainmaking and hail suppression around the country.

China regularly suffers from natural disasters, and its weather-modification operations are the largest in the world, a report by the Xinhua News Agency said yesterday.

Thirty of the country's 34 provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions and special administrative regions and 1,952 of about 2,900 counties have been involved in such operations and they are equipped with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns, 4,991 special rocket launchers and more than 32,300 people, figures from the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) said.