FOG TO RAIN SERIES

[CHAPTER 01]

 

A Speculative Climate Essay from the NDC Climate Imagination Series

 

 

 

Before a strange idea becomes technology, it often begins as a story.

 

When I was young, imagination had a different shape. It lived in giant robots hidden under rivers, in cartoons where metal heroes waited beneath the city, and in the belief that somewhere below an ordinary landscape, something impossible might be sleeping. Later, the world watched cars transform into robots on movie screens. What once looked like childhood fantasy became a global visual language. Machines changed shape, cities became stages, and the impossible became easier to picture.

 

That is how the future often begins. Not as a correct answer, but as an unreasonable image.

 

I think that is why I keep returning to climate ideas that sound strange at first. Years ago, when Australia suffered massive bushfires, I remember watching the scale of the fire and thinking a simple, almost childish thought: if the forest is burning for that long, why can’t we make rain? Why can’t drones gather moisture, push it upward, and force the sky to answer?

 

At the time, it was only a thought. There was no structure around it. But we now live in a different era. An idea does not have to remain only a private image. It can be shaped into a scenario, a visual system, a speculative essay, and a question that others can see.

 

That is where fog enters.

 

Most people treat fog as scenery, inconvenience, or danger. It hides roads, delays flights, covers reservoirs, and disappears after sunrise as if it never meant anything. But fog is not nothing. Fog is water suspended in air. It is not rain yet, and it is not a full cloud in the sky, but it is still atmospheric water.

 

If a cloud is water floating high above us, fog is water that stayed close to the ground.

 

That sentence changes the frame.

 

Conventional artificial rain usually begins with clouds. A cloud already exists, the atmospheric condition is checked, and seeding materials may be released to encourage droplet growth. The direction is familiar: cloud first, rain later. But what if we begin earlier? What if we do not wait only for clouds? What if we start with fog?

 

A reservoir is not only a place where water is stored. It is also a place where water surface, mountain terrain, temperature difference, humidity, and valley wind meet. In the early morning, dense fog can form over the water and stay close to the surface. In ordinary water management, that fog is not counted. It appears, floats, and vanishes.

 

But in this speculative climate imagination, fog becomes a question.

 

Can it be observed before it disappears? Can it be mapped? Can it be gathered? Can it be lifted? Can low atmospheric water be connected to the upper cloud layer before it is lost?

 

This is not a claim that rain can be made on demand. It is not a verified technology, and it is not an engineering manual. It is a speculative climate essay for the NDC era: an attempt to imagine water before it becomes visible to conventional infrastructure.

 

The first drone does not make rain. It searches.

 

It enters the fog layer and reads humidity, temperature, wind direction, density, thickness, and movement. It does not see fog as a soft background for a morning photograph. It sees fog as a temporary water layer that must be understood before the sun removes it.

 

The next drone does not scatter the fog. It gathers.

 

That is the first reversal. Fog removal tries to clear visibility by dispersing fog. This idea imagines the opposite. It collects the low moisture, guides it toward a concentration zone, and prepares it for vertical movement. Fog stops being a problem of sight. It becomes material.

 

Then the lift begins.

 

In this imagined system, drones are not only flying machines. Their propellers are redesigned as airflow tools. A swarm of modified drones creates a controlled upward current, pushing concentrated fog away from the reservoir surface and toward a higher, cooler layer of air. The propeller is no longer only a device for flight. It becomes a device for shaping atmosphere.

 

The goal is not to throw water into the sky. The goal is to ask whether low water can rise.

 

If the lifted fog reaches nothing, the experiment ends. But if it approaches a humid upper layer or the lower edge of a cloud base, the question changes. Fog is no longer isolated near the surface. It becomes a moisture bridge between the reservoir below and the cloud layer above.

 

Conventional rainmaking looks down from the cloud. This imagination looks up from the fog.

 

After that, the idea becomes more delicate. Fine droplets do not become rain simply because we want them to. They must meet, collide, grow, and become heavy enough to fall. In natural clouds, this happens through complex atmospheric processes. In this scenario, paired drones may create weak, controlled electric-field zones—not lightning, not spectacle, but quiet fields that help fine droplets meet each other.

 

The point is not to command the sky.

 

The point is to help small drops find one another.

 

Only after search, gathering, lift, linkage, and coalescence does seeding appear as a final conditional support. It is not the beginning of the idea. It is the last nudge, used only if the atmosphere is already close enough to respond. The sequence matters because this is not “spray something into the sky and make rain.” It is a staged imagination: find the fog, gather it, lift it, connect it, grow it, and only then ask whether rainfall can begin.

 

The rain, if it comes, is not the miracle. The data is.

 

How much fog was present? How much was gathered? How much was lifted? Did it reach the cloud base? Did droplets grow? Did rainfall occur? Did the air cool? Did humidity shift? Did water return to the reservoir system in any measurable way?

 

A pilot is not a miracle. A pilot is a way to make a strange question measurable.

 

This is why the idea belongs to the NDC era. Rain does not directly erase carbon dioxide. A rainfall event is not a carbon-reduction switch. But water supports the systems that make carbon reduction meaningful. Moisture keeps forests alive. Living forests hold carbon better than burned landscapes. Rain cools surfaces. Cooler cities may demand less energy for air conditioning. Water supports crops, reservoirs, and ecological resilience.

 

Carbon reduction is not only about smokestacks. It is also about keeping alive the landscapes that still know how to hold carbon.

 

Maybe this idea fails. Maybe the physics is too unstable. Maybe the energy cost is too high. Maybe drones can observe fog but cannot guide it. Maybe fog remains fog.

 

That is possible.

 

But the future does not always begin as a correct answer. Sometimes it begins as an uncomfortable question.

 

Can fog become rain?

 

Not today as a product. Not tomorrow as a guaranteed technology. First, as imagination.

 

The old rain ritual asked the sky to send water.

 

The NDC-era rain ritual may ask something different:

 

Where is water hiding before it becomes rain?

 

Do not wait only for clouds.

 

Start with fog.

 

 

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2026.06.09 - [공상과학 에세이] - Why Fog Over Reservoirs?

Why Fog Over Reservoirs?

 

 

 

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