Supply of fresh water is one of the most critical requirements of modern civilization (See, for example the article Water Wars. Huge amounts of money and effort are put into dams and others forms of water storage, yet even advanced countries with enormous infrastructure investments in this area can still experience problems.
A virtually unexploited source of fresh water is marine rainfall. The amount of rain falling on the seas is very significant, apparently averaging around 1500 millimetres per year, which may be higher than the average for land.
Since the seas and oceans cover some 70% of the Earth's surface, if all the marine rainfall was collected and redistributed evenly over the land, it would add some 3500 mm to existing rainfalls. This is ample to grow any required type of vegetation, even rainforest.
This group of memons considers a few of the ways that this source of fresh water could be exploited and some of the engineering parameters involved.
INDICATIONS
Any structures built for marine rainfall collection would need to allow for contamination by salt spray and breakage by heavy seas and faunal attack.
Many sea creatures ultimately depend on the sunlight permeating down from above as their energy source. If the structures devised for fresh-water collection were mostly transparent, the light supply should be little affected.
Related memons:
Marine Rainfall: Floating Reservoirs: Detail [8897 - Y]
Marine Rainfall: Moving Reservoirs to Usage Points: Detail [3563 - Y]
Marine Rainfall: Pumping Water to Usage Points: Detail [1937 - Y]
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