Alpha, This post feels so timely given the questions I'm sitting with in the northern New Mexico context. I'm wondering what it would take to catalyze a learning community that is focused on developing a design discipline around bringing back the rain. Think of it as a community dedicated to action research, bringing together practitioners on the ground along with leading scientists and designers. What would it look like to accelerate collective learning, advancing tools and processes that aid practitioners around the world to craft experiments, learn, and iterate within their contexts? What is the learning curriculum that enables communities to conduct landscape science in concert with domain experts? Can we begin to imagine a new mode of collective learning that meets the moment on a timescale that matters? These are some of the questions I'm holding at present.
perhaps we could have regular zoom meeting for people interested in such water restoration projects around world. I would also be interested in developing some kind of learning curricula perhaps.
I would love this from Australia. I haven't managed to get many people interested but more and more I'm talking about this and learning to generate conversations.
My partner has said; regreen the desert, reverse climate change.
I think it's a story many young people need at the moment.
In the near term, I'm curious about the fundamental questions that need to be addressed to understand where breakdowns are happening in a landscape, as a precursor to identifying candidate regions for intervention...
Have you shared your writing with water managers? I repost your articles from time to time so that they might be paid attention to the politicians and engineers running our Southern California water districts, especially the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. They are just barely beginning to recognize the realities of climate change, but a lot of that recognition is superficial in terms of action. Water management is in a state of crisis all over the world, and too often the best that they can come up with is that we need more technological wonders so that we can continue like we always have--as if rain will follow the plow so plow on, endlessly. Some of the tech, like purewater treatment projects, are great but insufficient without looking at the whole picture as you and others are doing. The Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority in Southern California (Orange County) probably comes closest to the philosophy of water restoration that you are talking about. It's hard to penetrate water-politics with science unless that science is used in arrogance for short term exploitation and gratification--the usual politics of water management, but it has to be done, somehow.
That was the very question I wrestled with last year—until I realized: it depends.
Yes, even a small vegetated patch can bring rain. But the deeper questions are how much and for how long.
In controlled seasonal conditions—absent strong external drivers—a 10×10 km² area in Oman, studied by Branch and Wulfmeyer, demonstrated a 20% increase in precipitation. So yes, it works.
But scale matters.
Micro-patches can spark local change. But to sustain and amplify rainfall, you need to hit a threshold—what I’d call a “functional footprint.”
That’s why I usually treat 30 km² as a safe starting zone—large enough to activate feedbacks, yet modular enough to build around. From there, we adapt based on landform, vegetation type, and atmospheric context.
Hi, thats interesting this idea of functional footprint. I have to think about it more. But it sounds quite plausible we need a larger restoration area to create your functional footprint. Maybe to create that shift in atmospheric circulation...... Thanks for the info on Branch and Wulfmeyer. I didnt know about them previously. I added this info to the essay above....... I looked up their paper, they simulated a Jojoba plantation in desert which was actually 100km x 100km (some sites mistranslated their number to 10 x 10) .
Apha, excellent information and data gathering. Now we need a new class of environmental engineer that uses these tools. Earths gifts to us that often we ignore.
"𝑴𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒂́𝒏 𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒇𝒍𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏, 𝒂𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅 10 𝒌𝒎 × 10 𝒌𝒎 (6 𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒔 × 6 𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒔, 𝒐𝒓 𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉𝒍𝒚 25,000 𝒂𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒔" 6 miles x 6 miles is a township as established in the USGS surveying protocols from the Lewis and Clark times. Therefore there exists in American consciousness these 6 mile squares already plated and waiting to be embraced. Now the idea of planting your neighbors rain needs to be championed.
Another great article - and subsequent discussion. For Southern Africa, I believe we need to aim at partially restoring the land all the way from say north/eastern Botswana (the sort of epicenter of the dry interior) and the Mozambique Channel (from whence comes most of our Ocean moisture). Also from NE Botswana up to the Congo Rainforest, which helps to generate the all important convergence. I worry that an isolated 30kmx30km plot in the middle of a denuded area may indeed attract more rain, but quite possibly at the expense of the surrounding area. Overall the regional rain may deplete. You can see that in many of the Google Earth images I share on the website Radio4pasa.com/bring-back-the-rains. (There is definitely one or two in the talk that I gave to our conservation society WECSZ in April 2025, available on that page). Land under private management is reasonably well conserved and is experiencing adequate rain, but the surrounding (communally owned land) is fairing much worse, and is getting far too little rain
another way to see this, is if the rate of atmospheric moisture blowing in the ocean is constant, and we hold it in landscape for longer, before it either blows out again, or flows out via rivers back to oceans, then there should be a net increase in atmospheric moisture over continents. think of a faucet flowing into a bathtub, and a drain on the other side of the bathtub, so water is continually flowing in and continually flowing out, if we extend the time the water is in the bathtub then there will more water in the bathtub.
this is really cool, that you are working to implement this. I do think we want more than just 30x30km. We want to build in from ocean. Also restoring more of the Congo rainforest has a huge downwind effect, including giving rain to the great green wall.
There are so many feeds going on in my life that I cannot remember whether I have actually discussed this before, but, in 1985 I was lucky to spend a night with Hanbury Brown in Sidney. Although he was a Radio Astronomer he was a real polymath and one of the subjects he touched on was that Science in Australia had concluded that Cloud Seeding had not improved rainfall overall. Seeding a cloud might mean that you got some rain here, today, but it did not lead to a higher average for the region. I think the 30x30km cell would do the same.
As I have said on another post this morning, there are no Get Out of Jail Free cards in saving this planet. 30x30km blocks of pristine forest will be great, but we will still have to restore the great majority of land that has degraded vegetation cover and damaged soils.
If you do restore land, it isnt subtractive, because you are slowing the passage of water moisture across the continent. It takes time to come down into forest. The water lies in soil for awhile, and then it goes up again. When you slow it, there is a net total extra moisture above a continent. Its analogous to why slowing water in streams leads to extra water on a continent. See my museum analogy from last weeks post about putting rocks in rivers.
Replying to your last two comments together, and in the Southern African context (which is the only one I know well enough to talk about) I don't think rocks in rivers (for the 'beaver' effect) is an appropriate strategy. I believe we need to capture the rain IN THE FIELD before it even reaches the river. (Would it be too much to aim for a situation where there is NO surface runoff, and ALL stream flow is maintained by seepage sideways out of the water table?) In so many cases, any runoff from the field would include significant amounts of soil erosion, which we simply cannot afford. For much of the region, according to Anastassia, "planting the rain" is going to be more important, at this stage, than restoring the trees. There is no doubt that trees do help with infiltration of rain into the soil, but their main contribution to the terrestrial water cycle is in transpiring moisture (and nuclei) back into the atmosphere to induce more rain, particularly at the start of the rainy season, before the arrival of the ITCZ - as again Anastassia shared research on this effect in South America.
I am not certain which would be more effective for these benefits, lots of 30x30km cells of almost pristinely restored woodland surrounded by 50x50km blocks of treeless farmland, or most of the region (look at Zimbabwe for instance) 'developed' into farmland with much more functioning soils (than we have at present) and covered with a population of 20 large mature "rain" trees/ha fairly evenly distributed throughout the area. This is hardly a natural system, but with the massive growth in human population (with another 200m expected in the region in the next 16 years) I believe it is the best we can hope for.
We want stream flow, so it can over the banks downstream and give water to the floodplains. Slowing the stream, allows water to seep into aquifers. Then plants can evapotranspire that aquifer water in the dry season to create rain.
Alpha, I have a couple of questions regarding the UK, where I live, if I may pick your brains!
The UK is well-known for having a wet climate and lots of green vegetation. But we have severely deforested the country over the years, which would, according to what you write about the water cycle and vegetation, in theory lead to less rainfall and a drier climate. At the moment we seem to be getting weather patterns where wet weather sets in for a very long time (as was the case for the past two years), and then at some point switches to a long period of very dry weather (as we are currently experiencing). My understanding is that we are increasing tree cover throughout the country, but we are simultaneously building more houses and concreting over larger areas. What is going on here, do you think? And is pastural land, with good soil, as good at keeping the system in balance as trees and other vegetation?
Secondly, a group in my area are planning what to do with a 4 acre former school playing field that we want to save from development by the local council's Property Services. We want to create a bit of a green oasis, and are wondering what to do about the native vs non-native vegetation question. Planting for a stable water cycle is a really important factor. Yet I note that forest gardeners tend to plant many non-native species in order to increase biodiversity as much as possible, as well as a variety of food sources. What are your thoughts on this?
Global warming is affecting weather patterns also, and making them more extreme….. reforestation or restoring grasslands is what can lessen the extremes… I am not an expert in ecology, but my guess is when it’s biodiverse , and the non native species survives in that community it’s probably ok. The non native species idea is not a strict rule.
"Despite their rarity, IN have a substantial impact on the properties of mixed phase clouds. In part this is because IN are rare in comparison to particles capable of serving as CCN, but it is also related to the fact that a liquid cloud below 0 °C is thermodynamically unstable. In many systems, including clouds, a transition to a more thermodynamically stable state can happen promptly despite the system having previously persisted in a metastable state for a long period of time.44 Ice nucleation in a small fraction of cloud droplets can trigger a transformation in the whole cloud and substantially modify its properties. Since ice is more stable than supercooled water below 0 °C, ice crystals have a lower equilibrium vapour pressure.45 This causes a water vapour concentration gradient to form between the air around ice crystals and the supercooled water droplets, leading to growth of the ice crystals at the expense of the supercooled droplets. This is known as the Bergeron–Findeisen (sometimes referred to as the Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen) process.7,46 The timescale for glaciation through this process depends on temperature and pressure and in the middle troposphere at −20 °C the timescale is on the order of minutes. This process is thought to be critical in many low- and mid-level clouds, resulting in a cloud containing large ice crystals of a considerably lower concentration than the original liquid droplet concentration. In vigorous convective systems a supersaturation with respect to liquid water may be maintained, even in the presence of ice particles and under these conditions both ice and supercooled droplets will grow.47,48 If sufficiently large ice crystals form, they can collide with supercooled droplets, which freeze on contact in a process referred to as riming. This collision coalescence process is an important mechanism in the formation of rain and hail."
The point is the rarity, in a forest these higher temperature IN particles are found in fungi and bacteria, with the ability to create nucleation at temperatures of up to -2 degrees Celsius.
My hypotheses is broadly based on the idea that ocean based algae blooms create a high interaction of not only phytoplankton but also with bacterial communities which have a much higher IN than the phytoplankton themselves. The brief description of the two ocean currents that circulate Australia is trying to show a physical representation of this interaction and the subsequent effect on the climatic conditions we are currently experiencing.
I am currently trying to find if any research has been done on the types of bacterial communities associated with high concentrations of phytoplankton and their IN properties, because as you know bacteria is constantly circulating in the air and these have the ability to massively increase in association with the right organic partners.
The fact that John Martin stated " give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age" is in relation to Iron seeding to create phytoplankton blooms but could also create the perfect conditions for bacterial based IN and rain creation. Hence the statement of " warm rain in winter"
Hope this clears thing up a bit. you have probably already done a whole post on this and I have just missed it. Thanks again
Maybe John Milton should have said "give me half a tanker of iron and I will flood the world"
The trouble we are having with rain at the moment as we go through a one in 500 year flood event in our area (as I have just finished mopping out a section of our house) is that we do not know the composition of the precipitation nuclei and therefore the temperature and amount of the air mass that will be rain bearing. , I previously commented on the relationship of dry rivers ,low nutrient flow and drought across the bottom of our continent Australia , the East coast where major currents move from north to south over 4000km give or take at 1km per hour less eddies etc is the opposite with high river flows and nutrient release into the ocean . This has bought torrential rain that started in to tropical north late last year and early this one then leading to a cyclonic event that hit Brisbane 2 months ago (last occurred in 1974) and now another 1000km south we are hit with 1 in 500 year flooding, all I would assume due to nutrient rich runoff creating a lower differential in temperature of precipitation nucleation from algal blooms, therefore a stalled systems and warm rain in winter and lots of it. I have commented before that every fishing boat does not need to go out empty but could be fertilizing the oceans to feed us and create some of the rain we desperately need. Thanks again for such an informative article.
Thank you for this!!
Alpha, This post feels so timely given the questions I'm sitting with in the northern New Mexico context. I'm wondering what it would take to catalyze a learning community that is focused on developing a design discipline around bringing back the rain. Think of it as a community dedicated to action research, bringing together practitioners on the ground along with leading scientists and designers. What would it look like to accelerate collective learning, advancing tools and processes that aid practitioners around the world to craft experiments, learn, and iterate within their contexts? What is the learning curriculum that enables communities to conduct landscape science in concert with domain experts? Can we begin to imagine a new mode of collective learning that meets the moment on a timescale that matters? These are some of the questions I'm holding at present.
perhaps we could have regular zoom meeting for people interested in such water restoration projects around world. I would also be interested in developing some kind of learning curricula perhaps.
I would love this from Australia. I haven't managed to get many people interested but more and more I'm talking about this and learning to generate conversations.
My partner has said; regreen the desert, reverse climate change.
I think it's a story many young people need at the moment.
In the near term, I'm curious about the fundamental questions that need to be addressed to understand where breakdowns are happening in a landscape, as a precursor to identifying candidate regions for intervention...
Have you shared your writing with water managers? I repost your articles from time to time so that they might be paid attention to the politicians and engineers running our Southern California water districts, especially the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. They are just barely beginning to recognize the realities of climate change, but a lot of that recognition is superficial in terms of action. Water management is in a state of crisis all over the world, and too often the best that they can come up with is that we need more technological wonders so that we can continue like we always have--as if rain will follow the plow so plow on, endlessly. Some of the tech, like purewater treatment projects, are great but insufficient without looking at the whole picture as you and others are doing. The Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority in Southern California (Orange County) probably comes closest to the philosophy of water restoration that you are talking about. It's hard to penetrate water-politics with science unless that science is used in arrogance for short term exploitation and gratification--the usual politics of water management, but it has to be done, somehow.
i respect beavers more with every passing year. wonderful article
Alpha,
That was the very question I wrestled with last year—until I realized: it depends.
Yes, even a small vegetated patch can bring rain. But the deeper questions are how much and for how long.
In controlled seasonal conditions—absent strong external drivers—a 10×10 km² area in Oman, studied by Branch and Wulfmeyer, demonstrated a 20% increase in precipitation. So yes, it works.
But scale matters.
Micro-patches can spark local change. But to sustain and amplify rainfall, you need to hit a threshold—what I’d call a “functional footprint.”
That’s why I usually treat 30 km² as a safe starting zone—large enough to activate feedbacks, yet modular enough to build around. From there, we adapt based on landform, vegetation type, and atmospheric context.
Hi, thats interesting this idea of functional footprint. I have to think about it more. But it sounds quite plausible we need a larger restoration area to create your functional footprint. Maybe to create that shift in atmospheric circulation...... Thanks for the info on Branch and Wulfmeyer. I didnt know about them previously. I added this info to the essay above....... I looked up their paper, they simulated a Jojoba plantation in desert which was actually 100km x 100km (some sites mistranslated their number to 10 x 10) .
sorry my bad, i made that mistake.
Apha, excellent information and data gathering. Now we need a new class of environmental engineer that uses these tools. Earths gifts to us that often we ignore.
Thanks. Yes we need the environmental engineer to do a new form of work
"𝑴𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒂́𝒏 𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒇𝒍𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏, 𝒂𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅 10 𝒌𝒎 × 10 𝒌𝒎 (6 𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒔 × 6 𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒔, 𝒐𝒓 𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉𝒍𝒚 25,000 𝒂𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒔" 6 miles x 6 miles is a township as established in the USGS surveying protocols from the Lewis and Clark times. Therefore there exists in American consciousness these 6 mile squares already plated and waiting to be embraced. Now the idea of planting your neighbors rain needs to be championed.
Interesting!
Is the Australian desert a good place to reforest / regenerate the landscape?
I've read that we once had a lot of wetlands here and there were once huge animals in Australia, all long gone.
Could we reverse climate change through a committed attempt to regreen the Australian outback?
We have so much desert and likely plenty of valleys near small towns where water capture and aquafer refill experiments could be run.
Start regreening nearer coast then move inwards.
Enjoyed that. Thank you
Another great article - and subsequent discussion. For Southern Africa, I believe we need to aim at partially restoring the land all the way from say north/eastern Botswana (the sort of epicenter of the dry interior) and the Mozambique Channel (from whence comes most of our Ocean moisture). Also from NE Botswana up to the Congo Rainforest, which helps to generate the all important convergence. I worry that an isolated 30kmx30km plot in the middle of a denuded area may indeed attract more rain, but quite possibly at the expense of the surrounding area. Overall the regional rain may deplete. You can see that in many of the Google Earth images I share on the website Radio4pasa.com/bring-back-the-rains. (There is definitely one or two in the talk that I gave to our conservation society WECSZ in April 2025, available on that page). Land under private management is reasonably well conserved and is experiencing adequate rain, but the surrounding (communally owned land) is fairing much worse, and is getting far too little rain
another way to see this, is if the rate of atmospheric moisture blowing in the ocean is constant, and we hold it in landscape for longer, before it either blows out again, or flows out via rivers back to oceans, then there should be a net increase in atmospheric moisture over continents. think of a faucet flowing into a bathtub, and a drain on the other side of the bathtub, so water is continually flowing in and continually flowing out, if we extend the time the water is in the bathtub then there will more water in the bathtub.
this is really cool, that you are working to implement this. I do think we want more than just 30x30km. We want to build in from ocean. Also restoring more of the Congo rainforest has a huge downwind effect, including giving rain to the great green wall.
There are so many feeds going on in my life that I cannot remember whether I have actually discussed this before, but, in 1985 I was lucky to spend a night with Hanbury Brown in Sidney. Although he was a Radio Astronomer he was a real polymath and one of the subjects he touched on was that Science in Australia had concluded that Cloud Seeding had not improved rainfall overall. Seeding a cloud might mean that you got some rain here, today, but it did not lead to a higher average for the region. I think the 30x30km cell would do the same.
As I have said on another post this morning, there are no Get Out of Jail Free cards in saving this planet. 30x30km blocks of pristine forest will be great, but we will still have to restore the great majority of land that has degraded vegetation cover and damaged soils.
This also arrived in today's inbox: https://gfr.wri.org/latest-analysis-deforestation-trends
puts a 30x30km cell into perspective
Is your point that forests are burning down at very large scales, and so we need to reforest?
If you do restore land, it isnt subtractive, because you are slowing the passage of water moisture across the continent. It takes time to come down into forest. The water lies in soil for awhile, and then it goes up again. When you slow it, there is a net total extra moisture above a continent. Its analogous to why slowing water in streams leads to extra water on a continent. See my museum analogy from last weeks post about putting rocks in rivers.
Replying to your last two comments together, and in the Southern African context (which is the only one I know well enough to talk about) I don't think rocks in rivers (for the 'beaver' effect) is an appropriate strategy. I believe we need to capture the rain IN THE FIELD before it even reaches the river. (Would it be too much to aim for a situation where there is NO surface runoff, and ALL stream flow is maintained by seepage sideways out of the water table?) In so many cases, any runoff from the field would include significant amounts of soil erosion, which we simply cannot afford. For much of the region, according to Anastassia, "planting the rain" is going to be more important, at this stage, than restoring the trees. There is no doubt that trees do help with infiltration of rain into the soil, but their main contribution to the terrestrial water cycle is in transpiring moisture (and nuclei) back into the atmosphere to induce more rain, particularly at the start of the rainy season, before the arrival of the ITCZ - as again Anastassia shared research on this effect in South America.
I am not certain which would be more effective for these benefits, lots of 30x30km cells of almost pristinely restored woodland surrounded by 50x50km blocks of treeless farmland, or most of the region (look at Zimbabwe for instance) 'developed' into farmland with much more functioning soils (than we have at present) and covered with a population of 20 large mature "rain" trees/ha fairly evenly distributed throughout the area. This is hardly a natural system, but with the massive growth in human population (with another 200m expected in the region in the next 16 years) I believe it is the best we can hope for.
We want stream flow, so it can over the banks downstream and give water to the floodplains. Slowing the stream, allows water to seep into aquifers. Then plants can evapotranspire that aquifer water in the dry season to create rain.
Alpha, I have a couple of questions regarding the UK, where I live, if I may pick your brains!
The UK is well-known for having a wet climate and lots of green vegetation. But we have severely deforested the country over the years, which would, according to what you write about the water cycle and vegetation, in theory lead to less rainfall and a drier climate. At the moment we seem to be getting weather patterns where wet weather sets in for a very long time (as was the case for the past two years), and then at some point switches to a long period of very dry weather (as we are currently experiencing). My understanding is that we are increasing tree cover throughout the country, but we are simultaneously building more houses and concreting over larger areas. What is going on here, do you think? And is pastural land, with good soil, as good at keeping the system in balance as trees and other vegetation?
Secondly, a group in my area are planning what to do with a 4 acre former school playing field that we want to save from development by the local council's Property Services. We want to create a bit of a green oasis, and are wondering what to do about the native vs non-native vegetation question. Planting for a stable water cycle is a really important factor. Yet I note that forest gardeners tend to plant many non-native species in order to increase biodiversity as much as possible, as well as a variety of food sources. What are your thoughts on this?
Thank you so much!
Global warming is affecting weather patterns also, and making them more extreme….. reforestation or restoring grasslands is what can lessen the extremes… I am not an expert in ecology, but my guess is when it’s biodiverse , and the non native species survives in that community it’s probably ok. The non native species idea is not a strict rule.
Thanks!
Sorry I write as I think so I will try and more clearly clarify the steps,
you know the biotic pump, this is in part to the Ice Nucleating Particles IN
The following is an extract from
Ice nucleation by particles immersed in supercooled cloud droplets
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2012/cs/c2cs35200a
"Despite their rarity, IN have a substantial impact on the properties of mixed phase clouds. In part this is because IN are rare in comparison to particles capable of serving as CCN, but it is also related to the fact that a liquid cloud below 0 °C is thermodynamically unstable. In many systems, including clouds, a transition to a more thermodynamically stable state can happen promptly despite the system having previously persisted in a metastable state for a long period of time.44 Ice nucleation in a small fraction of cloud droplets can trigger a transformation in the whole cloud and substantially modify its properties. Since ice is more stable than supercooled water below 0 °C, ice crystals have a lower equilibrium vapour pressure.45 This causes a water vapour concentration gradient to form between the air around ice crystals and the supercooled water droplets, leading to growth of the ice crystals at the expense of the supercooled droplets. This is known as the Bergeron–Findeisen (sometimes referred to as the Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen) process.7,46 The timescale for glaciation through this process depends on temperature and pressure and in the middle troposphere at −20 °C the timescale is on the order of minutes. This process is thought to be critical in many low- and mid-level clouds, resulting in a cloud containing large ice crystals of a considerably lower concentration than the original liquid droplet concentration. In vigorous convective systems a supersaturation with respect to liquid water may be maintained, even in the presence of ice particles and under these conditions both ice and supercooled droplets will grow.47,48 If sufficiently large ice crystals form, they can collide with supercooled droplets, which freeze on contact in a process referred to as riming. This collision coalescence process is an important mechanism in the formation of rain and hail."
The point is the rarity, in a forest these higher temperature IN particles are found in fungi and bacteria, with the ability to create nucleation at temperatures of up to -2 degrees Celsius.
My hypotheses is broadly based on the idea that ocean based algae blooms create a high interaction of not only phytoplankton but also with bacterial communities which have a much higher IN than the phytoplankton themselves. The brief description of the two ocean currents that circulate Australia is trying to show a physical representation of this interaction and the subsequent effect on the climatic conditions we are currently experiencing.
I am currently trying to find if any research has been done on the types of bacterial communities associated with high concentrations of phytoplankton and their IN properties, because as you know bacteria is constantly circulating in the air and these have the ability to massively increase in association with the right organic partners.
The fact that John Martin stated " give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age" is in relation to Iron seeding to create phytoplankton blooms but could also create the perfect conditions for bacterial based IN and rain creation. Hence the statement of " warm rain in winter"
Hope this clears thing up a bit. you have probably already done a whole post on this and I have just missed it. Thanks again
Hi, theres a bit of research on how phytoplankton leads to dms, which leads to cloud seeding. https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/18/10177/2018/ and https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/17/9665/2017/ .... Also I have a three part series on bacteria, fungi, and how they seed rain https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/bacteria-make-rain-bioprecipitation
Maybe John Milton should have said "give me half a tanker of iron and I will flood the world"
The trouble we are having with rain at the moment as we go through a one in 500 year flood event in our area (as I have just finished mopping out a section of our house) is that we do not know the composition of the precipitation nuclei and therefore the temperature and amount of the air mass that will be rain bearing. , I previously commented on the relationship of dry rivers ,low nutrient flow and drought across the bottom of our continent Australia , the East coast where major currents move from north to south over 4000km give or take at 1km per hour less eddies etc is the opposite with high river flows and nutrient release into the ocean . This has bought torrential rain that started in to tropical north late last year and early this one then leading to a cyclonic event that hit Brisbane 2 months ago (last occurred in 1974) and now another 1000km south we are hit with 1 in 500 year flooding, all I would assume due to nutrient rich runoff creating a lower differential in temperature of precipitation nucleation from algal blooms, therefore a stalled systems and warm rain in winter and lots of it. I have commented before that every fishing boat does not need to go out empty but could be fertilizing the oceans to feed us and create some of the rain we desperately need. Thanks again for such an informative article.
How much? A lot.