The 2023/2024 rainy season in Southern Africa is now way past us.

Or what was supposed to be the rainy season anyway; a prolonged dry spell in the region in early 2024 scorched crops and threatened food security for millions of people.

The drought was an expected, if intense, manifestation of typical, interrelated El Niño effects throughout the region. During El Niño years, the probability of drought increases significantly across Zimbabwe, Southern Zambia, Southern Mozambique, Southern Malawi, and South Africa.

But what broke our hearts here was the fact that none of these countries – especially given their close ties with China, the commercial drone capital of the world – ever tried to be proactive and deploy the drones up in the atmosphere for a bit of cloud seeding.

It might have worked. It might have not. But now we will never know, because we did not try.

In Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, where a drought is currently threatening, the government has deployed drones for cloud structure detection and boosting cloud seeding capacity to improve ecological environment conditions in the area, according to China Meteorological Administration (CMA).

Reports out of China say the experiment was carried out at the weekend in Xinjiang’s Bayanbulak area.

The report did not identify the drone manufacturer, but described the drone as large, measuring 10.5 meters in length, 3.1 meters in height and with a wingspan of 20.2 meters.

It was said to fly for up to 40 hours, and at an altitude of up to 10,000 meters, covering a maximum distance of 8,000 km when fully loaded.

According to Cai Miao, a staffer with the Weather Modification Centre of CMA, the large drone, equipped with a detection system, can more precisely identify the timing and conditions for precipitation, and increase cloud seeding capacity.

“Deploying drones in precipitation operations contributes to improving regional ecological environment, vegetation growth, and enhancing water conservation capacity,” Cai said.

It looks like there was some success with this experiment, which we first reported to have been tried in the United Arab Emirates, one of driest places in the world.

It is well and good that statemen in the countries affected by drought have sent out SOS’s to world humanitarian organisation to feed their populations.

But we do feel that, before then, some forays with drones into the lower atmosphere to trigger some form of precipitation certainly would not have hurt.

Especially since this is not the first time China has tried to induce rainfall using cloud-seeding drones: when the heatwave in China’s Sichuan province persisted in 2022, the government deployed drones to seed rain clouds to try and trigger some form of rainfall in the area.

At the time, a China news daily reported that on Thursday, the Chinese government, through the China Meteorological Administration “used its self-developed Wing Loong-2H UAV to assist fight against drought in SW China’s Sichuan.

“The drone ignited 20 silver iodide flame bars during its 4-hour flight to create “artificial rain” for the drought-hit region.”