Doing Something About the Weather At Last, Sam

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. But now engineer and inventor Stephen Salter is suggesting that maybe it wouldn't be so hard to do something about the weather at all.

In his scheme, seawater will be sucked up from the ocean into pipes within the blades. Nozzles at the ends of these pipes will turn the water into an aerosol and spray fine droplets from the trailing edges of the blades 5 to 20 metres above the sea surface into the turbulent wake of the rotor.

This, Salter points out, will hugely increase the surface area of water that can be turned into water vapour. The turbine will also overcome one of the main brakes on evaporation from the ocean, he argues. The problem is a wafer-thin layer of stagnant, humid air that clings to the surface of the sea and prevents water molecules from escaping.

Salter calculates that with a wind speed of 8 metres per second, each "spray turbine" could lift more than half a cubic metre of water a second to a height of 10 metres. Hundreds or even thousands of the machines in hot areas of the world could make enough rain to prevent droughts, he estimates. "The successful large-scale deployment of spray turbines could reduce the number of people who are short of water by several billion."

Source

Read more at Fatknowledge Blog, a very fine blog indeed.

While Salter's "ocean mist" scheme may be tagged as a way to combat global warming, in reality it is a way to stir up the weather considerably, and hopefully to reduce drought and bring fresh water to many people who are presently without it. The lack of clean fresh water is a far greater environmental problem than the more fashionable CAGW. We should never forget that water vapour is the most meaningful greenhouse gas, but that water in the atmosphere performs a very complex function that is not amenable to current climate models.