The world is vast, and now it seens to be warming rapidly. Three “Heat domes” cover the US, the Atlantic and part of Europe. Asia is also struggling with 52 Celsius heat. This is a disaster for food production. Luckily not everywhere in the world at the same time, but that could happen.
How to do anything about this? A heat dome is a body of hot air that traps the air underneath. It circulates but near the surface the air remains hot. On land this is inescapable. The heat makes the air rise, and it will cool as it rises (against space which is very cold) for that the atmosphere has to be thinner so the CO2 blanket doesn’t get in the way. Then the air is cold and wants to sink, but it sinks around the hot dome, not through it.
Hail does something different, it is formed when water evaporates and rises, then reaches a height where it can also cool against space, then it forms into ice (if there are nucleation points), and it starts to fall down.
Hail can turn into rain when it falls through hot air, then it can reevaporate and people on the ground never notice anything. This is even more likely with rain. Hail will however fall right into a heat dome, not slide off at the sides like the cold air. If it reaches the ground the ice cools the surface. I call this ‘gravity cooling’ and I think it deserves such a name because it really is one of the few ways to cool the ground in spite of the hot air that may be around.
When we consider our options regarding the heat domes, only those at sea can be reduced if we mobilize hail to do it. This could then help cool the air that blows towards land. This is the way to do it :
You disturb the surface water under the atlantic heat dome enough to encourage evaporation. This is how tropical storms are formed. Normally the air above the water is so saturated with water, so humid, no more water can evaporate. This means the water is under a humid blanket and warms up more and more. By disturbing this humid layer the water can evaporate and start to rise upwards. This causes a wind at the surface which then pulls out more heat from the ocean into the convection column.
If that convection colum contains enough water it will form clouds, rain will fall, and if it rises high enough even hail. I am not expert but I would like weather modellers to see what is needed to achieve this effect. We have a vast Atlantic, but maybe we can trigger the evaporation artificially, thus causing cooling convection of air to the higher atmosphere. This can then mean that the ocean remains cooler, land remains cooler, more clouds also reflect sunlight.
Artificial hail may be triggerable from the clouds that form, and this will really mean a cooling of the ocean below.
If you are a climate modeller, what do you think?