Jakarta (ANTARA) - Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) is tightening standard operating procedures for weather modification operations following public reports of solid dry ice falling on residential areas, officials said Tuesday.
The technical adjustments aim to ensure safety during cloud-seeding missions designed to dissipate severe haze caused by ongoing forest and land fires across Sumatra and Kalimantan.
"The tightened procedures involve installing special filters on the sprinkler hoppers and breaking the dry ice into finer particles to evaporate completely in the air before reaching the ground," said Berton Panjaitan, Acting Head of BNPB’s Disaster Data, Information, and Communication Center.
Under the procedure, dry ice—solid carbon dioxide chilled to minus 78.5 degrees Celsius—is dispersed from aircraft at altitudes between 5,000 and 7,000 feet.
The rapid cooling breaks the atmospheric inversion layer, allowing trapped smoke to rise and disperse over a wider area.
Despite the technical adjustments, BNPB noted that the trial operations have yielded positive results.
Cloud seeding using millimeter-sized dry ice pellets in South Sumatra successfully improved flight visibility at Palembang's Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II Airport.
The aerial operations are being conducted in collaboration with the Indonesian military and the Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG).
Missions launched in South Sumatra using Casa 212 aircraft on Oct. 16 were expanded to Central Kalimantan on Oct. 19.
The dry ice technology forms part of a broader response fleet consisting of 49 aircraft—including 32 water bombers and 17 patrol and weather-modification planes—alongside more than 60,000 ground personnel operating across six priority provinces.
Through combined air and land operations, joint task forces have extinguished over 454 hectares of burned land out of a total target of 1,024 hectares across Riau, Jambi, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, and South Kalimantan.
Translator: M. Riezko Bima, Resinta Sulistiyandari
Editor: Aditya Eko Sigit Wicaksono
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