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UAE To Build Artificial Mountain To Improve Rainfall (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The United Arab Emirates is in the early stages of developing an artificial mountain that would force air upwards and create clouds that could produce additional rainfall. While the Middle East and Africa continues to get hotter, researchers are further motivated and more desperate for solutions to maximize rainfall. "Building a mountain is not a simple thing," said NCAR scientist and lead researcher Roelof Bruintjes. "We are still busy finalizing assimilation, so we are doing a spread of all kinds of heights, widths and locations [as we simultaneously] look at the local climatology." The specific location has yet to be decided on as the team is still testing out different sites across the UAE. "If [the project] is too expensive for [the government], logically the project won't go through, but this gives them an idea of what kind of alternatives there are for the long-term future." Bruintjes said. "If it goes through, the second phase would be to go to an engineering company and decide whether it is possible or not."
The problem is the exponential increase in material required to gain any useful elevation. A massive reforestation project down at sea level, on the other hand, could have a similar effect; fission-powered desalination could supply the irrigation needs.
Who are we kidding? It's UAE, this hill will be built by slaves.
Thinking way back to my introduction to civil engineering subject in first year before the courses split (that's the way we did things in the 1980s) there was a practical session about airflow around large structures. We put blocks in a tank with flowing water and squirted dye in - fun, but it showed why it gets windy at the base of skyscrapers unless effort is made to break up the airflow.
The two topics are not disconnected even at the very entry level. City microclimates from large flat areas etc are another issue that has been considered even at the introductory level for decades.
I know you're just joking, but I'm going to answer anyway. The answer is no. The whole point of this is to deflect massive amounts of air. A massive sheet deflecting air is a sail. A mountain sized sail is going to be vastly stronger than the most powerful helicopters on the planet. They would be hurled out of the sky.
When I thought of this at first, I thought that the idea with a mountain is to chill the air, and there may be easier ways. Then, I thought desalination is going to be cheaper to make water than refrigerating the air, are they afraid they'll run out of sea water? But, sea levels rise with global warming, and my first impression of UAE was that it's pretty flat, so I thought, maybe they also want some artificial high ground to which they can retreat. Before commenting on that, though, I asked Google, what is the highest point in UAE? It turns out that Jabal Al Jais (over on the Eastern point, by Oman) is 1910 meters tall, and the satellite view shows that it doesn't have a wet side. Hawaii is closer to the equator, and mountains that are less tall have a wet side. This leads me to strongly think that the air may not be the best available resource for getting potable water. I'd try desalination of the stuff in which the artificial islands are built.
X to the 2nd power is exponential.
No. X^2 does not increase exponentially with X. It is not "exponential" in any meaningful sense. Would you say that X=1 is "exponential" with an exponent of zero?
When mathematicians, or algorithm designers, say something is "exponential", they mean it is a function with the variable of interest (in this case, the height of the hill) in the exponent. The volume of a hill, as a function of its height, is NOT exponential.