How to make it rain in California.

[joshcryer]

Yes, you read that title correctly. Make it rain. Make it freaking pour. Make the skies open up with billions of gallons of water to put out every single fire.

It's pretty simple actually. All you do is take a very large, 5k+ fleet of ships into the Pacific, and have them pump sea water straight into the air.

Water evaporates at a much higher rate when it's particlized, double, potentially triple the amount that it does now. It's just a matter of getting the particles small enough so that they evaporate relatively quickly once they get into the air. This is actually a problem related to water loses in hot climates when people water their lawns or water farmland, and has been studied pretty well (with new sprinkler systems that mitigate as best they can the formation of small spray particles).

Here's a paper detailing how to keep spray from evaporating: http://www.engr.usask.ca/societies/csae/c9901.pdf

Instead of following their recommendations, of course, do the exact opposite and make a very evaporating spray, something that will reach the 45% levels that they were discussing. Obviously there are limitations due to Boyle's Law, which is why you need a rather large fleet to pull it off. One specially designed ship could potentially pump a few hundred thousand gallons of water a minute. But that water would create a local humidity (essentially a fog) around the boat, limiting the actual evaporation of the spray.

There would naturally be a requirement to pick the best spot to set up (as high pressure zones could push the ensuing clouds the wrong way), but these are things that can be potentially modelled and worked out.

Anyway, I just felt like rambling. If this is the wrong forum for this post, then sorry. I like thinking of solutions, this is just one of the many crazy ideas I have had.

Couldn't hurt to try it though, could it? :)

[OffWithTheirHeads]

1. Aw hell, I just wash my car

Works every time.

[TahitiNut]

29. GMTA ... I was going to suggest that 100,000 Californians immediately wash their cars.

The resulting downpour would wash half the state out to sea. Hopefully, it'd be the right-wing half. :evilgrin:

[OffWithTheirHeads]

30. Fuck em, let Visalia burn!

nt.

[gateley]

2. Better than someone I knew who was convinced that xeroxing bagels would feed the hungry. nt

[JuniperLea]

8. That reminds me of an administrative assistant...

I used to work with who taped pennies onto envelopes along with postage stamps... well, hell! The rate increased!

[soothsayer]

15. Or who xeroxed the floppy disks when the guy said to copy them

[JuniperLea]

22. haha!

Good one!

[fenriswolf]

3. a potential problem with that

is that sea water contains salt, you shoot it up into the cloud where does the salt go? does it stay with the water? does it fall with the water? do we salt our soil?

[joshcryer]

5. It won't go into the air. 20% of the water will evaporate, most of the salt will fall back down.

If you keep moving the ship the salt content of the water at the surface wouldn't go up too appreciably, so environmental problems might be able to be mitigated.

[MrMickeysMom]

35. I'm not sure that is right...

weather systems move over water and pick up from the particulate matter HUMIDITY, which can precipitate back on land. You see it all the time, but I'm not sure the magnitude of what must get "kicked up" in order for that to happen, or whether ships could produce that source of movement.

Hey, at least it's a suggestion...

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. Sounds good, except...

The winds are blowing in the wrong direction at the moment...

The Santa Ana winds blow from the NE, down over the mountains where they speed up and get hotter and dryer...

Then they head out to sea.

Once the prevailing westerlies return (and they shall!) then the humidity will rise, and the fires will be more easily put out.

[joshcryer]

9. Wouldn't north east be fine? We're creating a pressure zone with lots of humidity.

It'd potentially float over northern California and then down.

[Kutjara]

6. To what altitude would the ships have to pump the water?

And do we have access to 5k+ ships with the necessary equipment to do the job?

[joshcryer]

11. A few hundred feet maybe? Boyle's Law again, it's going to become distributed.

We're raising the humidity level, significantly, 10x more than natural sea water evaporation. It'll distribute up and out.

Also, 5k ships is probably a bit cheaper than the billions of dollars of damage that is being caused by the fires.

[porphyrian]

7. I think the problem with it would be the Santa Ana winds.

They are blowing the East and Northeast from desert, and with hurricane force at times. You would somehow have to get the humidity significantly inland closer to where the winds start for there to even be a chance at getting it to rain before blowing back out to sea. And, since the desert wind is so dry in the first place, most of humidity would be sucked up like a sponge, maybe not even making clouds. But, there might be a way to get the water way up into the atmosphere, over the winds, to get it where you want it.

[joshcryer]

10. Wait, *from* the desert?

North East to me implies from, say, Tijuana toward Arizona. And the NOAA wind maps I'm looking at imply this direction.

edit: hmm, could be confused here, either way it's a matter of placement, no? We have a large water vapor dense area floating over seattle right now, flicking down toward CA, if we doubled the humidity at just the right spot in that area it could bring down the pressure zone. As far as I understand anyway.

[porphyrian]

14. What do I know? I live in Florida.

That's the way I thought it went, though. It's not a bad idea you've got either way. They just have to decide the cost of making it happen is less than the cost of annual fires and drought.

[joshcryer]

20. Nah! You're absolutely right, I looked at smoke formations from here:

http://www.osei.noaa.gov/

However, that doesn't preclude it from starting further north, allowing it to piggy back on the Santa Ana winds. I'm currently looking at installing some modelling software to try it out (create a high pressure high humidity zone off of the coast and see how it behaves). :)

I'll post later with my results. :D

[porphyrian]

24. Cool, definitely do that. - n/t

[kestrel91316]

12. Sorry. The prevailing winds would just carry that water farther offshore.

[joshcryer]

13. If so, darn.

Seems we could pump up the humidity to the north and hope that it'd catch on to the Santa Ana winds.

[kestrel91316]

21. Sorry. The Santa Anas come out of the Great Basin.

I know you mean well.......

[joshcryer]

23. I'm going to set up an ESMF model and see what happens anyway.

Controlling weather sounds like a fun project. ;)

[Earth_First]

16. Step away from your avatar...

:hi:

[soothsayer]

17. haven't we known how to make rain for a long time now? cloud seeding

and all that good stuff? or did that turn out to be bad in other ways

[joshcryer]

19. Cloud seeding 'works' but only on clouds that are going to rain soon anyway.

It's not like you can make rain without the densities required.

[soothsayer]

36. or without clouds i guess. duh! thanks

[michreject]

18. This one is up there

with cinder blocks and steel mesh fencing.;-)

[Xithras]

25. Sadly, it won't work. You're forgetting volume.

While the density of clouds varies depending on temperature and altitude, a small 1 cubic kilometer cloud contains about 4400 tons of water. Given even an optimistic 20% evaporation rate, those ships would have to pump 22,000 tons of water skyward to manufacture this paltry little cloud. Even worse, a 1KM2 cloud isn't going to even have the thickness needed to generate the air currents required for rain or snowfall.

A good sized cumulonimbus cloud is about 10km by 10km, or approximately 100 cubic kilometers in volume. That clouds will contain about 440,000 TONS of water, and will require those ships to blow 2.2 million tons of water into the air.

Just to generate one decent raincloud.

[joshcryer]

28. One regular honda pump can pump a ton of water a minute.

I'm seeing some industrial pumps that can do 16 tons a minute. 5k ships with 50 such pumps would put out 4 million tons of water a minute. That's 800k evaporated.

I think the Santa Ana winds are a bigger deal breaker than the engineering problem. I'm working on getting a model set up once I can figure out how to use this software.

[Xithras]

32. It's an efficiency issue.

I didn't say it can't be done, just that it's not worth doing.

5000 ships, each with power plants sufficiently large to power 50 industrial water pumps. You're going to need engineers on each of those ships, people to pilot them, etc. You're talking at least 25,000 people. On top of that, you need a fuel to power the ships which power the pumps. Wind and solar ain't gonna cut it, so we're talking about burning gas. 5000 ships running an aggregate 250,000 water pumps are going to burn a LOT of fuel. What are the power requirements of those pumps you found? You could easily end up with a CO2 and smog output equivalent to that of a small city in your attempt to counter global warming. Even worse, that pollution will be generated at the same point at the evaporation, meaning that both will thoroughly mix and travel in the same directions at the same rate. Your rainwater would be polluted.

That energy and manpower would be better utilized by directing it into the power grid to support electric vehicles, and into desalinization plants to supply water for southern California. For the price of your 5000 ships (and even a basic barge design will set you back at least a million per boat), you could trade out peoples polluting cars for new ones that don't pollute.

Your idea would probably work, I simply don't think it's the proper way to address the problem.

[SoCalDem]

26. Um.. there are living creatures in that sea.. at least I hope some are still left

A better way to handle the fire thing in Calif, is for greedy developers to start being told NO!, when they plan these communities packed into canyons and perched on hilsides..


California WILL burn.. It always has, and always will.. The smart thing to do is to keep development AWAY from the burn-prone areas.

Buy the people out who USED to live there, and NOT allow more building in the areas that are going to burn..

[joshcryer]

27. CA is a desert as far as rain is concerned. It needs it either way.

And you pump from a few hundred feet down. 50+ miles out or so. The likelihood of sucking stuff up is slim and you can always design around the problem.

People like living in nature, I see nothing wrong with that. If anything the underbrush needs to be taken care of. Pike National Forest here in Colorado has brush clearing done regularly. I have not heard of a fire here at all.

But that's beside the point, the fires are happening now, and they need rain. I was trying to think of ways to bring it to them.

[babydollhead]

31. I wondered about using dehumidifiers in the south

plenty of water in the humidity.

[begin_within]

33. Maybe when Bush visits on Thursday, 10 million southern Californians will piss on him,

and it will turn into one giant flood that will put the fires out.

[seriousstan]

34. THANK GOD this isn't the science forum !!!!!

5000 ships

pumping watter how high?

at what sustained pressure DURING serious particlization(?) ?

a few hundred thousand gallons of water a minute?

Do we have to do the math?

Fuel?

Water displacement?

Formation of vessels?

Exact placement?