 The rain that falls from the
sky must equal the rate at which the sun lifts water into the
sky. (This photo of the sun over the Mississippi River is from
an Asian webpage about the Mississippi River.)
The August 21, 2009, issue of Science magazine has an article
on page 955 entitled, "Risks of climate Engineering." The
authors are Gabriele C. Hegerl and Susan Solomon.
The single illustration that accompanies the article includes
a graph showing rainfall over the land portion of the earth
during the years 1985 to 1999, averaging about 3-million cubic
meters per second. In the football field measure of things, one
second of rainfall onto land over the entire earth would cover a
football field to a depth of a thousand feet, and the rate of
fall would be equivalent to such a 1,000-foot column of water
falling at 700 miles an hour.
But the dry land represents only 29 percent of the earth's
surface; rain also falls in the oceans. Assuming that rain falls
at the same rate over the waters of the earth as over the land,
then the rainfall over the entire earth would be 10-million cubic
meters per second, a number that could be presented in terms of
football fields, except that the Mississippi River works even
better to make the following point.
If you Google , the top three hits
give 600,000 cubic feet per second "at New Orleans." (The
Wikipedia article gives 450,000 cubic feet per second in the
facts list at the top of the article, and 572,000 cubic feet per
second in the article's body.) The actual number is of course
unknowable, so a working number of 500,000 cubic feet per second,
or 14,000 cubic meters per second, will be used here as The Flow
Rate of the Mississippi River.
The rainfall rate over the entire earth, and the rate at
which the sun lifts water into the sky from land and oceans, is
equivalent to the flow of 750 Mississippi Rivers flowing straight
up into the sky for a mile or so.
If the solar power that evaporates water into the sky were
bought from the power company at the residential cost rate, it
would cost $4.6-million per second. The solar power is about 10
times the total energy use rate of all humanity. The total solar
energy that shines on the earth is about 10,000 times what humans
use -- and the sunlight that shines on the earth is only one part
in two-billion of the sun's total power that has been radiating
into space for some billions of years and, according to those who
contemplate these things, will shine for billions of years to
come.
Send comments to Bob
Back to Main Vapor
Blog Page
Back to Flash Evaporator
Page
|