After Burj Khalifa, the United Arab Emirates currently in the first stage of a man-made mountain development project wth hope that it will encourage raincloud development and maximise rainfall in a country mostly covered in desert.
According to reports UAE is looking to build a full-sized artificial mountain. Desert flatlands make it difficult for air to get the upward climb required to collect into rain clouds, but creating a mountain could help bring a certain amount of rain to the otherwise arid region.
“What we are looking at is basically evaluating the effects on weather through the type of mountain, how high it should be and how the slopes should be,” said Bruintjes of National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “We will have a report of the first phase this summer as an initial step,” he added.
Researchers are currently looking to determine if this type of mountain construction would be possible in the UAE at all, let alone what the dimensions of the mountain would have to be in order to encourage a significant change in meteorological patterns.
The mountain just needs to increase cloud formation, not necessarily the formation of rainclouds specifically, says Roelof Bruintjes, scientist and lead researcher on the NCAR team. Once clouds begin to form, a meteorological process called cloud seeding increases the amount of rainfall that those clouds can release. But it looks like construction of the mountain itself is still only in the wishful thinking phase.
However, before any construction can begin, the scientists and researchers at the NCAR will figure out the project pricing. If the pricing is found feasible, engineers will assume the phenomenal task of building the mountain in the middle of a desert.