Previously unknown impact of WW II heavy bombing

[John Kettler]

Daresay most of us here have studied WW II for decades, but NOTHING could've prepared me for this!  The premise seemed insane, but the research seems dead solid to me after reading the article. Many here are familiar with how battles seem to engender heavy weather. Indeed, this was the origin of the whole cloud seeding program, but this is in another realm altogether.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/25/world/wwii-bomb-raids-ionosphere-space/index.html

Regards,

John Kettler

[Sublime]

I found it interesting in thebarticle that they claimed the Blitz was no good to study because it was more or less continous from summer 40 to spring 41, then goes on to point out that Allied aircraft also carried heavier payloads and made it easier to measure.

Couple of things that made me think - wouldnt anything the Luftwaffe have done to Britain be nowhere near as continous as the bombing by the Allies from 43 onward? I do get it that the massive amounts of planes and way heavier payloads would be more measureable (making larger 'spikes' as it were) but I seem to be missing something fundamental about understanding the article.

Im amazed they.re able to study or measure any of this at all 70 years later.

Also of note theres an article on WiB IIRC about a team thats mapping and notating every American bomb ever dropped since Ww1 and the location to help with UXO efforts.  Naturally WW1 and WW2 had a lot of stuff and Korea but most of us will know that the US dropped waaaaay more ordinance on just S Vietnam let alone all of SE Asia from 65 to 75 than all of WW2 by far.  And we also heavily used cluster bombs which seem to alwaus leave one or two unexploded clusters and cause a lot of uxo headaches..  Apparently the teams been stuck on processing Vietnam quite some time...

 

One other question for everyone - France apparently has a  "zone rouge" where there was too much chemical weapons and explosives used that to this day people arent allowed to wander around in this area (s) Where is this area, how big is it? Is this just because chemical weapons or do we have similar European sites for WW2. I was just very surprised to hear about this as Western Europe is so wealthy and dense..

[Michael Emrys]

Typical CNN type story: long on sensationalism and short on science. Before I am going to buy this thesis, I am going to want to see some peer review of the numbers. Some of the logic as presented in the article seems hashed to me, but that may well be the fault of the reporter and not the scientists. One thing that puzzled me was no mention of postwar atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, which would have had a far more dramatic effect on the atmosphere it seems to me than all the bombs dropped in WW II.

Michael

[JulianJ]

I agree with Michael Emrys: I am sceptical of much mass media content nowadays.  This bit is just plain wrong: "The Allied bombing raids over German cities were more intense, shorter and occurred during the day."

I too would like  to see a proper scientific paper, before I jump to any conclusions.