Saturday, August 5, 2017

Rain with sea temperatures higher than land temperatures

I was interested to read about "The Slow Food Movement" and about "Campesina" in an "The Conversation" article, who are helping small scale farmers. But drought can affect small scale farmers badly. UAEREP (can be found on Facebook) is working with rain enhancement methods and I have my own rain enhancement methods. I hope what I say below will help countries lessen the effects of drought:
With global warming land is heating up faster than the sea and air blowing from the sea heats up more and the relative humidity (RH) drops more when air blows from sea to land.
Consider two cases:
1) If land temperatures are higher than sea temperatures, then air blowing from land to sea is cooled by the sea, its RH increases and water can condense out and it could rain over the sea. With high RH evaporation into air is reduced and the air will not pick up much moisture. When the air blows back with sea breezes it will have very little extra moisture in (it could have less).
2) If the land temperatures are cooler than the sea, then when air blows from land to sea the sea heats up the air and RH drops and the air readily takes up moisture from the sea, so that it has more moisture than it started with and when it blows back with sea breezes it will decrease in temperature over cooler land and and rain can occur from condensation.
Solution: So here is a solution. Make more spray (mist) over the sea with floating spray pumps operated by wave motion. Solar energy will be absorbed by the spray mist and evaporation will occur as the mist heats up. Then this moist air could supply rain when it blows to land. If possible, reflect solar energy from the land onto the mist that is generated over the sea, using mirrors.  

It takes less than 1 kWh to evaporate 1 litre of water. Now in sunny areas, every day, we can get more than 8 kWh of solar energy falling on every square metre. If the mist absorbs 1/8th of this, there will be 1 kWh of solar energy every day on every square metre, to evaporate the mist and heat the air that the mist is in. It seems we could evaporate 1 litre on every square metre every day. This is a significant amount of water to put into the air, and a 1 km by 1 km square could supply 1000x1000 = 1000000 litres per day to the air. By comparison, at 25 deg C and a relative humidity of 50% a column of air with base of 1 square metre and a height of 200 m has 2.3 litres of water in (evaporated water actually). At the same temperature, but with a relative humidity of 72% this column has 3.3 litres in (1 extra litre). Humid air has two advantages I can think of: 1) Humid air is less dense than dry air at the same temperature and pressure and rises (which can result in convectional rain). 2) Humid air can be heated by infrared radiation from the ground, causing it to rise - water is a greenhouse gas and this heating is part of the greenhouse effect.

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