Email Thread(s) which include the link 'https://groups.google.com/g/planetary-restoration/members' | |
A re-engineered salt water mist spraying system (7 emails 10/5/2024 to 10/12/2024)
A re-engineered salt water mist spraying systemOct 5 2024 1:31AM - J GOODWIN
Dear Restorers,
I'll take a guess that planetary-restoration@googlegroups.comhas been shut down for a year. Perhaps your group has migrated to somewhere in Facebook.
My focus today isn't on a political decision of whether or not a fleet of 1000 ships should be deployed to spray salt water mist into the atmosphere. My engineering focus sets aside the various social and environmental questions about trying this scheme. I only want to know how to do this same job more cost-efficiently.
To this end, you may want to know that I have designed a salt water mist particle spraying barge, sketched out on my own website at https://klinkmansolar.com/ktrees.htm#S4b
. My mister buoy is entirely self-contained in terms of energy use. As designed, it has no fuel on board. My goal is to efficiently add an appropriate mass of seawater mist particles per second into a tall, wide cross section of trade wind that blows past the floating buoy.
You need to hear that my buoy has been optimized to perform a different task than the creation of airborne sea salt particles. I want to add serious amounts of humidity to the local atmosphere in certain climates. For example, adding humidity to the atmosphere offshore from Chile, with trade winds blowing that newly humidified air up a 6000 meter mountain, will help to restore mountain glaciers on the mountain peaks. That said, if your goal is to create airborne microscopic sea salt particles then you'd simply need to drill smaller diameter nozzles into every spray dispersion pipe.
To tow the buoys across the ocean to and from a maintenance port, I also have a zero fuel tugboat at https://klinkmansolar.com/kships.htm#O1
.
Yours in Hope,
Paul Klinkman
Ships - Klinkman Solar
Trees - Klinkman Solar
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Oct 6 2024 6:42AM - robert@rtulip.net
Hi Paul, the Planetary Restoration google group is still operating. Also members of the Healthy Planet Action Coalition would be interested in your design.
You can join PRAG at https://groups.google.com/g/planetary-restoration/members
Regards
Robert Tulip
Oct 6 2024 8:27AM - Tom Goreau
Very interesting, good luck!
But trade winds blow AWAY from Chile, not towards it.
Thomas J. F. Goreau, PhD
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
Chief Scientist, Blue Regeneration SL
President, Biorock Technology Inc.
Technical Advisor, Blue Guardians Programme, SIDS DOCK
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http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466557734
Geotherapy: Regenerating ecosystem services to reverse climate change
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Oct 6 2024 8:55PM - Michael MacCracken
Dear Paul--Regarding your (or any) proposal for humidifying the air, what is it that makes you think the air will retain the moisture? The air is blowing over the ocean with long fetches and this provides plenty of opportunity for all the evaporation that the air will hold. Also, the ocean water temperature provides a limit on the evaporation as well. Unless there is warm dry air going over cold water, I would not think misting would work, and it would not work long because the air would cool. And if there is a deficiency in the humidity (say in the descending air in the subtropics), adding the humidity would be offset by less evaporation further downwind over the ocean. Basically, the atmospheric humidity is determined mainly by the atmospheric circulation--it may be that the air gets warmed inland so could hold more moisture, but this would be after it warms. Even if one has a mechanism for doing it, I would think more attention needs to be paid to whether the humidification of the air will really work.
Now, if the intent is to get more CCN into clean air, that is a separate question and misters could likely add CCN. The problem is that for MCB to actually work one has to be careful not to overseed the air, so for that to work one needs to know local conditions on a continuing basis. That requires also having monitoring systems, and then determining if there is a need for more CCN to get clouds.
Best, Mike MacCracken
Oct 6 2024 8:55AM - EDT, Michael MacCracken
Dear Paul--Regarding your (or any) proposal for humidifying
the air, what is it that makes you think the air will retain the
moisture? The air is blowing over the ocean with long fetches
and this provides plenty of opportunity for all the evaporation
that the air will hold.
Also, the ocean water temperature provides a limit on the evaporation as well. Unless there is warm dry air going over cold water, I would not think misting would work, and it would not work long because the air would cool. And if there is a deficiency in the humidity (say in the descending air in the subtropics), adding the humidity would be offset by less evaporation further downwind over the ocean. Basically, the atmospheric humidity is determined mainly by the atmospheric circulation--it may be that the air gets warmed inland so could hold more moisture, but this would be after it warms. Even if one has a mechanism for doing it, I would think more attention needs to be paid to whether the humidification of the air will really work.
...
Best, Mike MacCracken
Oct 12 2024 8:00PM - J GOODWIN
Hi Restorers,
I'm going to deal with a number of basic questions about atmospheric humidification that people have sent me.
Question: In which directions do the trade winds blow onto Chile or off of Chile?
Chile is an extremely long country. At Tierra Del Fuego, 54 degrees south longitude, the trade winds and the storms blow from west to east. Near the equator the trade winds blow from east to west, and the questioner was undoubtedly thinking of humidifying this particular section of Chile. In the middle the wind direction can shift from day to day. Also, onshore breezes tend to develop near shores in the afternoons because the air near the heated earth's surface onshore tends to want to rise.
I can imagine a great number of other places where a river of dry air often blows from salt water onto arid land. The American Southwest and Mexico are pretty starved for fresh water at this time, with fear of a coming megadrought and of the deaths of many ancient redwood trees. Some researchers want to restore the Sinai peninsula, which is surrounded on the southeast and southwest by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. Ethiopia looks rather dry these days. The Persian Gulf is surrounded by arid lands, all of which could use some extra humidity and rainfall. India has a dry monsoon season. Adding spring snowfall to Greenland or to parts of Antarctica would cover the extremely thin dark soot surface layer that has been absorbing solar heat lately, where the soot is contributing to the melting of the ice sheets.
One tool that I use to force a current of humid air to the peak of one particular mountain is a mountain slope air tube running up the mountain slope. In the 19th century a Vermont copper smelter built a hillside slope chimney out of slate to channel toxic copper smelting fumes out of a valley. For some applications I envision a tube with a huge cross-section for massive airflow up the mountain slope. This would deliver huge amounts of water vapor to a spot in the stratosphere above a mountain peak. Not a small amount of fresh water will condense out of the humid air stream on the way up.
Humid air has less mass per mole of molecules than dry air. You can look at the chemistry. A mole of H20 vapor masses 18 grams, 16 grams for the one oxygen atom and 1 gram each for the two hydrogen atoms. Dry air is 78% nitrogen, 28 grams per mole for its two nitrogen atoms, and about 20% oxygen, 32 grams per mole.
Bottom line, extremely moist, warm air rises like crazy compared to dry, cool air, which sinks. Hurricanes don't undergo rapid intensification without some powerful physics behind the scenes.
Question: The air is blowing over the ocean with long fetches and this provides plenty of opportunity for all the evaporation that the air will hold.
The atmosphere blowing across the ocean is several kilometers high. I don't doubt that the bottom one meter of atmosphere blowing laterally across the ocean gets rather humid, but does this humidification get evenly stirred into the atmosphere all the way up to the jet stream?
Also, moist parts of the airstream blow toward the poles, setting off rainstorms near dry air fronts ("near cold fronts" is rather less accurate than saying "near dry air fronts"), and then other dry parts of the airstream blow toward the equator. The trade wind airstream coming from the Sahara Desert to the mid-Atlantic is typically bone-dry and full of dust from Saharan dust storms. This dry, dusty air mass often acts as an extreme deterrent to the formation of hurricanes in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Typically dry Saharan air can get halfway across the Atlantic without becoming particularly humidified. The geological record shows dry Saharan dust concentrations in U.S. lake bottom core samples during certain periods, so yes, a mass of dry air can cross an ocean without getting that moist.
It turns out that equatorial jungles put far more humidity into the air than does the equatorial ocean. Jungles can transpire an enormous amount of water vapor per square kilometer of jungle. This has something to do with the total surface area of all the leaves in the forest versus a rather flat ocean surface touching a rather flat and undisturbed bottom of the atmosphere. Parts of the Amazon basin can see 3 meters of rainfall a year because all of these plants are thoroughly humidifying the bottom 30 meters of the atmosphere. Then huge thermals transport blobs of the warm, extremely humid air into the upper troposphere, where reduced air pressure cools the air, which causes precipitation, which moves latent heat into the air, which causes the wet thermals to explode upward into the stratosphere and create thunderclouds in the Amazon.
So, it might help to steadily humidify a cross-section of the bottom 30 meters of the airflow coming onshore, not just the bottom one millimeter of the airflow that often touches the ocean surface.
Question: Also, the ocean water temperature provides a limit on the evaporation as well. Unless there is warm dry air going over cold water, I would not think misting would work, and it would not work long because the air would cool.
With dry air, the air's low humidity means that lots of evaporation can take place even if the air above the ocean is the same temperature as the ocean surface. Perhaps there will be a very few days when near-zero humidification might take place.
Misting the air as it blows by cools the air and cools the mist particles. Heat in the air becomes latent heat stored in the evaporated water vapor.
Question: And if there is a deficiency in the humidity (say in the descending air in the subtropics), adding the humidity would be offset by less evaporation further downwind over the ocean.
It's possible to use solar heat to preheat the mist. The extra warming-moisturizing energy would tend to lead to better rising thermals nearby, thermals that carry the moist air far upward and that will pull new dry air down to the ocean's surface, increasing total moisture uptake in the moving river of trade wind air. Large, warmed thermals are likely to mix the thermal of newly humidified air well in the moving air river, possibly all the way up to the stratosphere. Mixing the air upward means that we can mix more humidity into a long cross-section of the air river, all within 30 meters of the ocean's surface, because we're regularly overturning the river of air to bring down more dry air.
Yours in Hope,
Paul Klinkman
Oct 12 2024 8:40PM - Michael MacCracken
Dear Paul--One of the suggestions for humidifying the air coming into California. So, I did a calculation of how much water would have to be processed. Perhaps you can check my calculation, but the amount is huge. For the calculation I considered, I assumed there was an airflow onto land for a 10 km wide strip that went up to 900 millibars (apologies for old units), so the bottom 10% of the atmosphere and the air was moving through at 10 km/hr.
So, lowest 10% of the atmosphere is roughly 100 g/cm2 mass of air times maybe 2% humidity (loading to attempt to get to given air coming along is quite dry), so we'll say want to get to 2 g/cm**2) and then times 10 km times 10 km/hr times 1 g/cm3 density of water. That is 200 times 10**10 g of water/hour. Then it is 10**6 g per ton and one comes out with 2 million tons of water per hour to process for each 10 km strip of coastline. That is one huge amount of water to be lofting. Scale my calculation as you'd like and it is still a huge amount of water. And adding water to lower atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect--which goes on day and night.
So, I'd be interested in how and for what purpose the huge amount of energy involved in lofting the water is being utilized?
Best, Mike
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