My Elevator Speech. Live Your Legends Blog Prompt 5

I think I can solve world drought.

Water evaporates. Which means it is lighter than normal air. When you see mist rising from a pond or stream on a cold morning, that is the normal evaporation that is only visible because it condenses into droplets big enough to see in the cold air. but it is going on all the time. Over every body of water, everywhere. When the water is warmer, the process speeds up, but it is normally a slow, gentle process, and sometimes the prevailing winds don’t carry the moisture back over the land.

I think I know a way to substantially speed up that process, and inject millions of tons of moisture into the upper atmosphere, and direct it to fall over land.

There is a design called a “Solar Updraft Tower” which utilizes several hundred acres of greenhouse coverings to use sunlight to heat up the underlying air, and direct it to flow up through a tall tower. This was originally designed to provide enough consistent high speed airflow to power wind turbines and create electricity. You can google it.

The original test model in Spain was built in a semi-arid desert region. And the other planned installations also are planned for deserts. But that is only because the builders are only thinking about wind speed. If you built the installation over water, not only would the uprising air be lighter (and therefore rise faster), but would include massive amounts of humidity, exiting the top of the tower at speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour. Heading straight up.

Instead of staying near the Earth’s surface, and being at the mercy of the prevailing winds, this directed flow of upward moist air would rise nearly to the troposphere, and cause a new phenomena – a stable man-made, moisture-rich low pressure area in a well defined column. In the northern hemisphere, winds around a low pressure area blow around it counter-clockwise, and should blow a substantial amount of the moisture over the nearby land areas. If all you wanted was to distill substantial amounts of fresh water, you could easily install coolers in the tower, and collect the condensation.

This isn’t a generalized blanket of evaporation over a large area, which gently wafts upward. It is a directed plume of high speed air, directed straight up. This also isn’t like a smokestack, or power plant cooling tower, whose purpose is to use water evaporation to cool the water with as little energy input as possible, and are designed to balance the airflow to be the minimum necessary to provide the necessary cooling or ventilation.

I need a surplus offshore oil platform (there should be lots of those around gathering rust), lots of scaffolding, and a team of construction/oil workers to test it out.

Who’s with me?

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