The United Arab Emirates, a small nation with big ideas, is now considering building a mountain. Why? To encourage precipitation. de zeen magazine notes:
Mountains are a major factor in rainfall as they force warm, moist air to rise and cool, and thus create clouds.
Increasing the number of clouds provides more options for seeding – a process where chemicals such as silver iodide or potassium iodide are added to clouds in the form of ice crystals, boosting rainfall.
No location has yet been set for the mountain, as the NCAR team is exploring various options.
“Building a mountain is not a simple thing,” Bruintjes told the website. “We are still busy finalising assimilation, so we are doing a spread of all kinds of heights, widths and locations.”
UAE’s The National’s Jonathan Gornall scores some quick comments from the British Meteorological Office:
“Without having looked into it, I can see there is an element of logic to the idea,” says Alex Burkill, a meteorologist at the British Meteorological Office.
Mountains do create rain, Mr Burkill says, because of what meteorologists call the “orographic effect”.
“In simple terms, as moist air meets the mountain it is forced to lift,” he says. “As it does, there is a drop in pressure and temperature, which condenses the moisture and forms clouds. And if there is enough water content, you will get rain.”
But as Newton’s Third Law tells us, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – and one that is something any mountain designer would have to take very seriously into consideration.
Orographic rainfall is all very well, Mr Burkill says, but “it is also worth highlighting the Fohn effect”. When the moisture has been condensed out of the air by a mountain, the air is much drier as it descends the far side, creating hot, arid conditions – something the UAE really doesn’t need more of. In Colorado, heat differentials of up to 30°C have been recorded.
Which brings up a point of immediate concern: what will this change in weather patterns cause in terms of the weather in other locations? Much like the Ethiopian dam that will affect Egypt’s Nile River, if a “river in the sky” is diverted and drained, who will find themselves high and dry?
Gulf News Weather points out there’s no official plans in the works, merely the gathering of data:
But no UAE official or agency has confirmed the existence of any concrete plan to geoengineer a mountain.
Five years after Holland nixed the idea to build an artificial €200 billion (Dh837.76 billion) mountain as cost-prohibitive, American atmospheric scientists have confirmed that they are now simply gathering data on the atmospheric effects a similar mountain in the dry deserts of the UAE could yield.
But this doesn’t stop Jamais Cascio to voice his concerns in the pages of NewScientist (21 May 2016, paywall):
This could affect other countries on the Arabian peninsula, the Middle East in general, even eastern Africa. Rainfall changes in already precarious environments wouldn’t go unnoticed, and may spark conflict in an unstable area.
Even if the UAE builds a mountain, the larger climate problem remains. What’s more, oil-rich nations in the region face a double-whammy: temperatures reaching levels beyond those human civilisation can handle, alongside the imminent end of the fossil-fuel economy.
This could be a last gasp attempt by the UAE to stave off unbearable heat by cashing in on the fact that oil is, for now, still in demand around the world.
