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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 engineering challenges for this are insane. Just trying to move that much materiel would break the bank. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of desal + irrigating the whole country comes in at a lower price....
President Trump's brilliant plan to address climate change.
'If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.'
Have gnu, will travel.
Sounds more like the UAE is jealous of Qatar's single project death-toll record for the World Cup and is determined to take the crown. The ads are probably already going out in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines for the sorts of disposable slave labor the region favors for large civil projects.
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
It's time to start steering our kids towards climatology and related fields.
This hill will be built by civil engineers, not climatologists.
My guess: for a mountain, all you need to do is pile up dirt. It's like a reverse mining operation: we have proven skill in moving enough dirt to build a mountain.
But for a wall, you need to do a heavy bit of engineering and a bunch of maintenance, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
UAE creates man made mountain to grab rainfall. Every other country "close" will blame them for any change in rainfall and at least some of that is going to be legitimate. Impact from this is going to be felt far and wide, so anywhere between India, Italy, and Russia are potentially impacted. It is not far fetched that a country that used to be able to feed itself suddenly has a starving populace because they no longer get any rain.
Every country in the World threatens war over weather modification, and there are numerous countries that have long sought to master weather control for the purpose of war. UAE's intent may not be to harm neighbors but that's not always how things work out.
If the UAE was building desalination plants to irrigate with, it would be a very different story.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
To have a significant effect, it would have to be about as tall as the tallest building on Earth, if not taller.
Yeah, the UAE couldn't build anything that tall.
My guess: for a mountain, all you need to do is pile up dirt.
Even simpler, you could build a molehill and then invite the Slashdot comment section over to do the rest.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
One word: skiing.
You have got to be kidding.
A quadratic function (or polynomial of degree two) is indeed on the form you specified.
But x to the 2nd power is not exponential, rather it's just an example of the quadratic function you mentioned, with b and c equal to zero and a equal to one.
f(x) = ax^2 + bx + c, which with a = 1, b = 0 and c = 0 becomes f(x) = x^2, which is quadratic and the same as "x to the 2nd power"
What IS exponential, is something like 2 to the xth power, or 2^x. But that's not what you wrote.
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.
If you build it near the coast, it could be used to live on when the sea level rises and wipes out what you built the mountain to protect.
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.
What about zero? Zero is an exponent. By that measure, my love life is improving exponentially...
That wall just got 10 ft taller!
Life is not for the lazy.
They want something that *functions* as a mountain. It doesn’t have to look like a regular mountain, and it doesn’t have to be solid all the way through. As someone else said, a wall might do the trick. And also, the structure could be hollow. Build a steel frame and cover it with inexpensive materials. As long as it has the desired effect, it doesn’t have to look like a mountain. And just imagine the uses that could be put to the interior as well. You could have an entire city in there in the shade. Presumably it would have to be mostly airtight, but if you made it out of translucent materials, then the amount of artificial light inside needn’t be extensive. Imagine a mountain made of plexiglass. Also, for something the size of a mountain, moisture would collect in the inner atmosphere, develop into clouds, and even rain sometimes. If the air inside is cooler than outside, they might want to limit air exchange (i.e. no active ventilation), requring that plants be grown inside to keep the oxygen levels up. Even pollution levels could be kept down if burning is kept to a minimum (no diesel or coal generators inside, but maybe short hydrocarbons like natural gas for cooking, if they even have a supply of it in there).
I’m sure there are a million caveats I’ll never think of, but if they’re going to build something that big, they might as well make it more useful than just a wall and even possibly make it give a return on the investment through taxes. It would require maintenance.
The funny thing about all of this is that Mexico wants the wall too and is willing to chip in for it.
A wall on the Mexican-American border will slow and possibly stop the drug trade which is devastating the northern parts of Mexico.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?