The many wildfires raging in our western states this summer testify to the fact that the normal rate of evaporation from oceans, lakes, and bays is not sufficient to prevent drying out of the soil and vegetation. This is because sunlight normally penetrates deep into water. The solar energy is absorbed by a large volume of water and the water temperature is increased only slightly, resulting in the normally experienced evaporation rate. I have experimented with black panels floating just beneath the water surface. The top surface of the black panel absorbs incident solar energy. Its temperature increases and heat is transferred to the thin layer of water above it, raising its temperature so that evaporation is greatly enhanced. Preliminary calculations show that the evaporation rate can be increased to a value sufficient to humidify neighboring and downwind areas.
I have devised means of mass producing these floating panels, stringing them together on synthetic fiber ropes, rolling 100-ft lengths of these rafts onto reels that are mounted on workboats, transporting the reels to the raft site, unreeling the raft sections, mooring them to anchors at the site, and stitching adjacent strips of rafts together to form rafts about 100 ft square, leaving bare water between the squares so that ambient air can reach them to efficiently pick up water vapor.
The rafts can be placed along the Pacific coast in locations that are sheltered from the surf, and inland lakes, such as Clear Lake in California and Lake Chelan in Washington. A large area is available in San Francisco Bay for evaporator rafts to humidify air that is drawn inland to replace the heated air that rises from the Mojave and Sonoran deserts during the summer. I would be delighted to share my construction and deployment sketches, and my preliminary performance calculations with interested people.
Name, address, phone, email address.
I have sent this and similar versions to two governors and several wildfire fighting agencies using snail mail when there was no email address listed. The only reply so far is a "mailbox full" notification from AOL about one of my emails. "Letters at Newsday" did not send me the automatic acknowledgment that I used to get until a few years ago. Don't know what I did to merit their shunning. So what to do? Time to get serious about evaporation rate calculations showing how much benefit is derived from a given raft area in a particular location. My calculations are sketchy and spread out over many years, scattered in many folders, and applying to locations all over the world. There's lots of stuff that I haven't learned how to do, and I'm a slow learner. Get busy!