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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."
President Trump's brilliant plan to address climate change.
Hey, we're talking about the UAE here . . . unfeasible expensive building projects don't need to make sense . . . in the "Talking Heads" sense of the phrase.
The answer to the material question is really quite simple, actually. Just use trash. Make the mountain an above ground landfill. The world is awash in trash, that nobody wants . . . hell, the rest of the world will pay the UAE to stash their trash in an environmentally friendly climate changing mountain in the UAE.
Old cars, useless electronic gadgets . . . bring it on, and pile it up! The baking hot sun will fry it enough so that it won't stink.
A win--win for the whole world.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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*
The problem is the exponential increase in material required to gain any useful elevation.
The increase in material would not be exponential. It would be a quadratic function of the height.
It's time to start steering our kids towards climatology and related fields.
This hill will be built by civil engineers, not climatologists.
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.
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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.
That wall just got 10 ft taller!
Life is not for the lazy.