Marine Brightening
Paul Klinkman
Dear Group,
You should probably ask an inventor how to perform marine brightening more cost-efficiently.
On August 9, 1976, Hurricane Belle had top winds at 120 mph. Wind shear tore the rainfall off of the top of the hurricane before final landfall. Belle came ashore around Bridgeport, CT on August 10 with a top wind gust of 77 mph and with almost zero rainfall. However, strong onshore winds put an enormous amount of salt spray into the air. A mixture of salt spray and dried sea salt particles blew five to ten miles inland and stuck onto tree leaves, denuding the trees. In one month the trees re-leaved. Wikipedia mentions that airborne salt buildup took out a power line in Rhode Island. I mention this incident because we want to fully study a side issue with marine brightening - potential salt particle damage to agriculture. Being forearmed with answers to engineering issues strengthens a project's overall argument.
I observe that in New England, sea salt particles will eventually dissolve in rain water. Dissolved sea salt gets into the ground water, into the rivers and back into the ocean. A massive influx of sea salt particles can have an immediate effect on agriculture but will rarely have a long-term effect. We might look into salt intrusion issues in agricultural areas near the Sahara Desert.
One tool to reduce and manage the effect of sea salt particles on agriculture is to pay attention to weather forecasts. Salt particles will have a limited half-life in the atmosphere. Don't dump salt particles into the sky on the worst 10% of days.
I'm enamored with Ascension Island in the tropical Atlantic ocean for several reasons. First, the island is a geological curiosity. Two centuries ago the island was an 859 meter tall volcanic cinder with no tree growth or topsoil at all. Starting in the year 1830 a British botanist brought 40 species of trees to Ascension Island in order to stabilize the island's production of drinking water. The project worked. Ascension Island is now permanently covered to its peak with cloud forest. Call it 19th century geoengineering if you will.
Second, Ascension Island is 1,600 km from the coast of Africa and 2,300 km from the coast of South America. Ascension Island has a minimal population and almost no local farming on its steep volcanic slopes. Placing a marine brightening station on Ascension Island might be less expensive than maintaining a brightening station at sea, and the island's remote location minimizes salt intrusion issues on either continent's agriculture.
Ascension Island is a few degrees south of a major hurricane formation zone. I can see an argument that a marine brightening station on Ascension Island would inhibit hurricane formation. Hurricane Ian may have exploded in ferocity in the Caribbean Sea and in the Gulf of Mexico, but the tiny atmospheric swirl that later became Hurricane Ian can be traced back across the Atlantic to the African coast. If a $100 billion hurricane such as Hurricane Ian in 2022 can be inhibited down to a $50 billion hurricane, the insurance industry might donate $5 billion for the project while they pocket the other $45 billion in savings for themselves. Now, would the insurance industry consider an utterly strange geoengineering project if it put $45 billion into their pockets? We won't know for sure, not until their accountants find enough time to count that much dough.
I'd recommend running a mountain slope solar updraft chimney up the slope of Ascension Island to its 859 meter peak, then imparting a vortex swirl within the chimney's air in order to maintain a vortex in the still-rising air, in order to put sea salt microparticles into the air at perhaps a 1500 meter altitude. This salt particle launching system would minimize the total mass of sea salt particles dropping back down onto Ascension Island and it would also increase the staying power of salt particles in the atmosphere. Building a vertical 859 meter tall solar chimney is almost past the current engineering capability of human civilization, but I could build a mountain slope solar chimney of similar function all by myself using tent poles, tarps and tent stakes, and I'm 69 years old. On second thought, please get some other crew of workers to perform this particular job, if you don't mind.
At the bottom of the mountain slope updraft chimney, heliostats, also known as solar tracking mirrors, would power the heating of salt water and the heating of air for the chimney. Heliostats can be positioned well up the volcano's slope so that we can find adequate solar power for a heating job that takes place almost at sea level. Microscopic droplets of heated salt water would be pushed into the rising column of hot air, creating salt microparticles in the air, always with limited total moisture that could later cause unwanted precipitation as the column of air rises and cools. This hot air and microparticle mixture would rise up the mountain slope inside the chimney, out the top of the updraft chimney and beyond, mixing far up into the atmosphere.
Creating and using overly saline salt water might be a good idea here, to put more salt microparticles in the upper atmosphere but with the same strictly limited amount of moisture in the chimney.
Yours in Hope
Paul Klinkman
klin...@cox.net
Stephen Salter
Hi Paul
Thank you for your email and drawing.
Twomey showed that cloud reflectivity depends on the size distribution of drops in a cloud with lots of small ones reflecting more than the same amount of liquid water in a smaller number of large ones. It is the number of successful nucleations that matters, NOT the amount of salt. We want a piccolo not a bass drum.
Measuring the amount of salt thrown up by breaking waves is not easy. The figure which I hope will show below gives salt estimates plotted against the year of the observation.
The thin black line from 1959 to 2004 shows the amount of salt form 1000 spray vessel releasing 30 kg a second all year which I hope will be far more than we need to solve the entire thermal problem. There is no point in us spraying during storms because there will already be so much. One day will be a year of the entire world fleet in all drop sizes. Tidal surges after hurricanes will produce even more.
Cloud brightening has to be done in clean air over big oceans because the air over land already has such large amounts of aerosol. Successful nucleation depends on the Kohler equations. The mass of nucleation material depends on the chemical nature of the aerosol and aerosol mass.
Sodium chloride is excellent for Kohler. My estimate for salt mass of 10^-14 grams.
Work by Alterskjaer and Kristjansson at DOI:10.1029/2012GL054286 shows the larger or small than this is not so good but some people argue for a smaller size. Small ones might fail to nucleate but enough of them can remove water vapour while larger ones can make rain. Both can therefore clear clouds, not what we want.
A narrow spread of sizes means that they all nucleate together. A few big ones would nucleate first at a lower relative humidity and grab all the water vapour to leave the small ones in the dry. A narrow spread of sizes will give them all a chance and also reduce collision losses in turbulent air flow.
The falling velocity of aerosol can be calculated by the Stokes equation with a correction due to Cunningham. Before nucleation the still air falling velocity is so small compared with the random turbulence velocities that we can ignore it. The effective lifetime is therefore about half the mean time between rain or snow showers which wash the sky clear. This will often be longer than 24 hours. We will get best results by spraying into the clean air left after rain with time for spray to spread before the air mass gets to a region of high humidity. We want a low dose over a wide area from lots of quite small sources.
If you speed up a video of mixed clouds over the sea you will that the air motion is like a roller with a horizontal axis and cloud appearing half way up and then clearing half way down. The rotation period is about 20 minutes. Turbulence will tend to produce a fairly even distribution through the boundary layer like cream in coffee. We do not need to pump anything up.
We might be able to do initial experiments on small islands but we need clean air upwind and downwind so we want soggy, grassy or frozen ones.
I believe that the mobility of wind-driven spray vessels is important because they can migrate with the seasons and be used tactically to where they are needed to moderate hurricanes and clear El Niño events. For a short time there is more solar energy going into the poles than the equator. Movement of spray vessel through the water can generate all the energy needed. With autonomous vessels there are no transport costs.
Spray vessel design is complete to the point where engineering drawings and design calculations can be sent to potential suppliers for quotations but they will do this only if they see a chance of getting a contract. Present policy, at least in the UK, remains hostile. Future generations might wish to identify the decision-makers responsible for delaying research.
The attached pages explain the spray generation mechanism.
Stephen
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design
School of Engineering
University of Edinburgh
Mayfield Road
Edinburgh EH9 3DW
Scotland
0131 650 5704 or 0131 662 1180
YouTube Jamie Taylor Power for Change
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klin...@cox.net
Hello Planet Restorers,
I lean toward using volcanic mid-ocean islands, where available, to distribute either distilled fresh water vapor, which forms fog when cooled by decreased upper altitude air pressure, or a mix of salt water fog microdroplets and vapor directly into a relatively cloud-free upper atmosphere starting each day near dawn.
A solar updraft chimney can be powered by 100% renewable local solar energy. Beyond that, the same chimney generates steady electricity for its own internal use or for dispatchable electricity for the island if the island incurs peak power needs. See: klinkmansolar.com/kchimney.htm.
My chimney can use as a moisture input either environmentally benign fresh water or inexpensive and cloud-seeding ocean water microdroplets designed to aid in downwind enhanced cloud creation, depending on any day's hurricane development area needs in that region. It produces, starting at dawn if desired, a flat blanket of a white cumulus cloud starting perhaps 500 meters above the island's mountain peak, perhaps 500 meters wide at first, and best guess perhaps 2 hours downwind before the weights of the individual fog droplets causes mixing with dry air and breaks up the cloud. With a prevailing trade wind of 20 km/hr, that's an immediate and all-day cloud of 20 square kilometers stretching downwind from the island's mountain peak. Given a known trade wind direction, we'll want to place the system's heliostats on the sunny side of the island. Heat is storable, and this storable solar power source allows the chimney to operate at dawn if needed.
Ships are holes in the water into which you pour money. I suppose that ships can be used where there are no islands. Most ships burn fossil fuels.
Islands have local sovereignty over nearby ocean waters and mid-ocean ships don't enjoy this sovereignty. With remote islands, marine brightening is less likely to cross sensitive national boundaries. It's easier to get one nation's approval than 200 nations' approval.
Given a correct wind forecast, after the first cloud's evaporation the remaining slightly heavy dried salt particles would then drift down toward the sea and out of the atmosphere at a relatively controlled, known pace, so that it can be demonstrated that agriculture on nearby continents won't be affected. In the meantime, seeding the upper atmosphere with microscopic salt particles is still likely to enhance cumulus cloud formation downwind.
With any method, avoid enhancing any strong low pressure swirls within the hurricane formation zone of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, de-enhance these swirls by enhancing cloud formation hundreds of miles away. Watch those long-range forecasts. Remember, U.S. insurance companies might pay you some good pocket money to de-enhance these swirls. I've heard that insurance companies are willing to invest $1 in order to get $7 back. If they can cut $100 billion in insurance losses (from recent Hurricane Ian alone) in half, they might invest $7 billion in order to save themselves $49 billion in raw insurance company profits.
Finally I'll mention that some scientists study the Antarctic or they study active volcanoes, and some scientists have died on top of erupting volcanoes. Other scientists choose to study tropical paradise islands. Here I see an opportunity for some atmospheric mixing specialist to study the latter. Just saying.
- - -
I propose that tropical mid-ocean atmospheric turbulence might be largely humidity-driven and only somewhat temperature-driven. A mole of H2O molecules has a mass of 18 grams. A standard mole of atmosphere has a mass of 29 grams. A mole of high-humidity air is going to be 1% closer to the 18 gram number than to the 29 gram number, which makes a fixed volume of the high-humidity air next to the surface of the ocean lighter than dry air. This lighter surface air will periodically form into air currents that rise through the atmosphere. Meteorologists have discovered that in the US Midwest, summer thunderstorms often originate at dry fronts as opposed to cold fronts. The heavier dry air on one side of the dry front slides underneath the lighter, moister air, which rises and then condenses, releasing latent heat. The exhaust from a ship's smokestack rises because it's both warm and humid. With time the heat dissipates but the humidity in a consistent current of air stays within that air current until dispersed through mixing.
Condensation and precipitation releases latent heat, I think of it as hurricane fuel, into a precipitating cloud, driving an extreme cycle of turbulence. The purpose of loading dust particles onto the top of a rising air current is not to form a very few initial fog droplets but to release latent heat, growing a taller cloud that interacts well with the colder air higher in the high troposphere or stratosphere, in the end creating many more reflective fog droplets.
If two salt particles form two fog droplets within a cloud and those two fog droplets combine, and then finally the combined larger fog droplet combines with drier air and evaporates, do we now have one heavier salt nucleus as opposed to the original two salt particles? As soon as raindrops fall through a cloud, negative ions are generated and then many fog droplets are electrically attracted to each other. I can think of mesoscale examples where a current of individual fog particles released to 1500 meters should be positively charged to limit future precipitation, and other examples where fog particles released to 1500 meters should be negatively charged to encourage some initial precipitation which leads to taller clouds. Electrical ionization of an updraft air current is absolutely cheap. Ionizers are now built into many HEPA air filters.
Is mid-ocean atmospheric turbulence lowest at dawn, generally picking up in the afternoon as certain sunlight wavelengths heat the uppermost layer of ocean near the surface, putting more humidity into the lowest layer of mid-ocean air? A relative lack of turbulence at dawn matters if the optimal goal is to put salt particles into the air at sea level around dawn on a clear day, wishing against hope that the particles will rise with turbulence and stay in the lower atmosphere or mid-atmosphere all day, then return and dissolve into the ocean at night.
On land, what is the effect of one microscopic salt particle attaching itself to one leaf? Does the grain of salt permanently burn a tiny hole in the leaf? Can each microscopic leaf wound allow a fungus disease to get a toe hold into the leaf and eventually kill the plant? Are plants found in shoreline environments more tolerant to blowing salt spray?
Would the pointed use of slightly heavier fog droplets released at 1500 meters be a way of guaranteeing that a higher percentage of heavier salt particles will drop out of the atmosphere before a particular air mass drifts over a relatively salt-sensitive mass of land?
Yours in Hope,
Paul Klinkman
Stephen Salter
Paul
You remark about ships being holes in the water into which you pour money is not helpful. The cost per unit volume of ships is far below that of aircraft and road vehicles and they are by far the cheapest and energy efficient way to move cargoes and energy around the world.
Your ideas for climate would benefit from calculations of the energy flows at every stage in the process. Every year we have to get rid of 550 x 10^18 Joules plus the energy consumption of whatever we use to drive the disposal plant. I hope that the attached note might help.
Stephen
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klin...@cox.net
I proposed a potent competitor to ship-based marine brightening. Compared to ships which burn fuel, my proposal runs on 100% solar-source energy. Lifetime operation costs per square meter of extra cloud per sunny hour should be lower, for the fundamental reason that ships must not fail catastrophically with all hands lost, while objects on land can often be repaired after they blow down in hurricane-force winds. Next, I examined the details of a widely suspected ecological shortcoming of putting sea salt particles in the atmosphere and I suggested ways to reduce opponents' objections to the possible adverse effects.
There's nothing more unhelpful to a grant seeker than a better engineered proposal that undercuts their own grant proposal, their academic lifeblood. Often research professors at universities are granted professorial status only as long as they keep bringing in grant money – some keep finding grants until retirement age, some don't.
Science is unfortunately littered with big research money emnity stories. For example, the Smithsonian and the U.S. Government unsuccessfully bet $2 million in the race to build the first aeroplane. The Wright brothers won on a shoestring budget. The ensuing feud on the Smithsonian's part lasted until 1942 when the last Wright brother died.
Personally, I carry a strong internal sense of what's forthright and what isn't forthright. This makes me horrible at being a team player, a desirable trait in business. I follow the engineering where it goes because I'd rather inhibit climate change than emphasize my own financial rewards for my career. If my inventions make powerful enemies, I can't help that.
I feel for your predicament. I send you my deep personal regrets for the damage that my new proposal may possibly be doing to your own proposals and to your career. The only way that I can possibly pay you back is to work with you on a better proposal.
Yours in Hope,
Paul
klin...@cox.net
I'm going to describe a key difference between a human chess player and a 1970s or 1980s-vintage chess-playing program. The old fashioned software program checks every legal move. It even checks walking a castled king back and forth behind his row of pawns, because those are legal moves. The program is thorough but then it has a time limitation where it has trouble looking beyond 3 or 4 moves ahead.
The human, on the other hand, looks immediately for a quick profit, say, a potential knight fork or a pin that ultimately nets a bishop, and in the process the human often ignores 90% of the other possible chess moves. Occasionally the human misses a subtle surprise move. Back in the '80s, typically the human would destroy the software program.
Now I can explain the difference between an inventor and a tenure-track faculty member. An inventor has never been beholden to being thorough, only to finding quick profitability and being right 90% of the time. For example, the fame of Nikola Tesla is that he realized the possibility and fundamental superiority (at the time) of longer-distance AC electric transmission versus DC transmission. Edison was, in the end, fundamentally wrong about DC electricity but he and his lab were right about everything from electric current generation with steam-driven dynamos to long-lasting light bulb filaments. The Wright brothers broke aviation down into three critical sub-issues that they identified and then solved: high engine power versus low weight, lift versus low drag, and adequate steering control.
Please try to see me as somebody with a specific developed skill set. Like it or not, you succeed when you collaborate with people who have skill sets that you don't possess. When I as an inventor skim through information, as opposed to reading 100% of the information, I jump to information that may have immediate profitability. I look for order of magnitude engineering blunders that the authors might have made. When I spot big trouble, that often means I have equally spotted a big opportunity. That's my job. That's what works in my own personal field. I understand if the same tactics would fail you disastrously in your own careers.
I write from an inventor's viewpoint. I see you all as a collection of non-inventors. In time, I want to see each individual for the added value that each of you can bring to the table and for the skill sets that each of you already has. Most of you would probably never cut it as an inventor. It's good that you're not contractually any inventor's student.
“If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see all of your problems as nails.” – Mark Twain. I sense that faculty tend to see all of their problems as students, because teaching students is the central skill that faculty have developed. I've seen a few burned out educators in my lifetime, and so my envy of your careers and your steady pay is limited to your steady pay part. I think that I'll stay what I am, an inventor.
Be that what it may, I'm attracted to this group because the Arctic permafrost is melting down at a well-estimated speed, and if 1.7 trillion tons of greenhouse gases migrates into the planet's atmosphere we're all going to feel regret. Each of your motivations for being here are probably not that different. I bring my unique skill set. In my opinion,you'll miss some profitable and useful engineering input if you choose to allow me to be driven away by complainers, but that's your call.
Yours in Hope,
Paul Klinkman
rob...@rtulip.net
Paul
My understanding of the superiority of ships over islands as a base for MCB is that it is helpful to constantly move the location of cloud production. Both should be studied. Your suggestion to use Ascension Island is interesting.
Regards, Robert
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