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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.
The increase in material would not be exponential. It would be a quadratic function of the height.
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.