Could water be extracted/harvested from clouds? Consequences?
I'm a newbie here and I'm slowly building a story based on Ancient Egyptian mythos that revolves around a primarily solar powered city in a vast desert. There will be magic and Gods involved, but I'd like parts of the world to be plausible.
A nearby river that this city was built by (loosely based on the Nile) completely dried up over the past hundred years. This is due to drought and extreme heat in the area, but there are larger bodies of water a great distance away. It's not feasible to transport water to the city, so my idea was to have the city build some sort of "Cloud Harvester" factory/technology that could suck clouds out of the upper atmosphere to supply water for the populace.
My questions are:
- Can water be extracted from clouds?
- How much water could you possibly get from a single cloud?
- How would this impact the weather/water cycle of the world?
- Would there be many clouds at all if the area is dried up enough to no longer sustain the river?
This is probably the first of many topics I'd like to brainstorm for this story's world, so any help would be greatly appreciated!
EDIT: I see the issue with having a "Cloud Harvester" in a dry climate, there won't be enough clouds. I'm curious enough about this idea to apply the question to areas outside of the area I described. Let's say this is happening in a wetter area for clouds to form, but the clouds aren't raining. Is it possible to suck up a cloud on a cloudy day and wring it out?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/54509. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
The core idea you have is very similar to that of an air well, and these have been around since ancient times. You are simply talking about building yours higher up in the atmosphere.
The air well works by encouraging dew to form. By allowing air to flow around stones, the natural moisture in the air is cooled. As it cools, the water vapor in the air condenses and is collected.
Putting one of these in the clouds now becomes an architectural challenge. Today we have skyscrapers that meet this criteria, but your ancient Egyptian-like people might have more trouble. They did however build the pyramids, so it is plausible they might have expanded that concept to a massive scale. Since the air well works at low altitudes though, I doubt they would have bothered.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/54520. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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