White flurries of snow fell from a mild autumn sky in Tokyo on Friday – not the latest example of extreme global weather, but part of a heat-busting experiment masterminded by Olympics officials.

A snow machine was used to create fake white flurries of snowflakes which showered down on volunteers during the trial, ahead of next summer’s Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

The machine is one of a series of measures being explored by Olympics officials to combat the intense summer humidity and temperatures that regularly top 30C in July and August.

“The organising committee want to try all we can to mitigate the heat, and this is one of the ideas that we came up with,” Taka Okamura, a senior director at the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee, told Reuters.

“It isn’t going to lower the air temperature, but hopefully the ice will make the people it hits feel cooler.”

The experiment took place during a canoeing event at the Sea Forest Waterway venue, with staff feeding blocks of ice into a snow machine mounted on a truck.

The machine dispensed around 300kg of snow over 150 volunteers seated in the stands during the initial five-minute experiment.