Massive solar farms could provoke rainclouds in the desert

In the United Arab Emirates, water is more valuable than oil. To support the needs of its desert-dwelling residents, the UAE relies on expensive desalination plants and campaigns of cloud seeding from aircraft, which spray particles into passing clouds to trigger rainfall. But according to a new modeling study, there may be another way to stir up a rainmaker: with city-size solar farms that create their own weather. The heat from large expanses of dark solar panels can cause updrafts that, in the right conditions, lead to rainstorms, providing water for tens of thousands of people. “Some solar farms are getting up to the right size right now,” says Oliver Branch, a climate scientist at the University of Hohenheim who led the work, published last week in the journal Earth System Dynamics . “Maybe it’s not science fiction that we can produce this effect.” Branch works in an emerging field that studies how renewable energy, a key response to climate change, can in turn alter regional weather patterns. In a 2020 study , researchers found that implausibly large solar farms, taking up more than 1 million square kilometers in the Sahara desert, could boost local rainfall and cause vegetation to flourish. But the bounty would come with a cost, the researchers found: By altering wind patterns, the solar farms would push tropical rain bands north. “If you push those northward, that’s not good news for the Amazon,” says Z...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research