Remembering The Australia Sequence

Considering that the world has broken it's record for global high temperatures and the devastating heat waves going on remember that there is a way to modify global weather, aside from reducing the carbon in the air, but it requires the cooperation of Australia.

THE AUSTRALIA SEQUENCE

Dust from North Africa is essential to provide condensation nuclei upon which water can condense to form the vast amount of dense cloud necessary for hurricanes. As the dust is swept out over the ocean by the east wind, it allows evaporated water from below to condense upon it.

Air with the ordinary low level of dust cannot hold the tremendous volume of water necessary for hurricanes. A hurricane is a self-sustaining circular storm. 

Hurricanes, which also go by other names such as "cyclone" and "typhoon", move generally westward because their spin, which they pick up from the spin of the earth, makes them semi-independent of the earth's gravity so that the earth rotates eastward under the storm.

Dust is a forgotten side of extreme global weather. It is well-known that global warming creates wilder weather by causing more water to evaporate, but the air could not hold the water for long without abundant dust particles to serve as cloud condensation nuclei. The phenomenon of desertification, the increase of desert area, is pointed to as reducing arable land, but it also means more potential dust in the air to seed hurricanes if the prevailing winds are right to take the dust out to sea.

An ideal illustration of how hurricanes are seeded by dust swept out to sea from north Africa can be seen in this image of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The mountains are at exactly the same latitude as the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Along this coast there is much less barrier islands, which are formed by hurricanes over long periods of time, than in Florida to the south or North Carolina to the north. That is because, with the prevailing winds being latitudinal, the mountains block dust from being swept out to sea by the wind. Image from Google Earth.

The way I see it, ground zero for global climate with regard to dust and extreme weather begins in Australia. It is dust from Australia, swept out to sea by the wind, that seeds the Monsoons and cyclones that afflict India and it's neighboring countries, in the same way that dust from North Africa is the foundation for the hurricanes that cross the Atlantic Ocean. The typhoons of the South China Sea are also seeded by dust from Australia. The prevailing winds over Australia carry it's loose dust northward, toward the equator.

Australia is a dry continent, that is getting even dryer. There are areas which used to be farmed productively, which now cannot be farmed at all. This can only mean more dust becoming available to be swept out to sea by the wind.

When there is more dust in the air, it does not mean that more water will evaporate from the sea below. There is essentially no more water in the air, the dust just makes it more concentrated. This means that when the tremendous volumes of rain fall on the Indian Subcontinent, the air emerges dry as the prevailing wind at that latitude moves from the east. So that when the air gets downwind to the Arabian Peninsula, there is little or no water to provide rain.

If there was rain on the Arabian Peninsula, it would be lush and green with vegetation. Much of the water would re evaporate, or be transpired by the plants, and travel further west on the east wind to fall on the Sahara Desert of north Africa. Then if this area was lush and green, it might not be the source of dust that it is to seed the hurricanes that cross the Atlantic Ocean.

Can you now see how Australia is ground zero for so much of the global climate? it is the beginning of what I have termed "The Australia Sequence". If only we could make Australia lush and green it would completely change the world for the better.

There would not be the dust to seed typhoons in the South China Sea. India, and neighboring countries, would not get the cyclones and extremely heavy rain. There would be water in the air to be carried along the east wind to fall as rain in Saudi Arabia. When that water re evaporated, it would carry further along the east wind to north Africa. The Sahara would become green, and would no longer be a source of dust to seed hurricanes heading for the western hemisphere.

What a better world that would be! This would most likely bring a potential increase in the world's food supply of between a quarter and a third, due to the vast increase in arable land.

It is easy to see why the east coast of South America is free of hurricanes, much unlike North America. Africa south of the Sahara is a land of expansive jungle and grassland. It is not dusty, and so does not supply the dust that would seed hurricanes that would move westward to strike South America. If only we could get Australia covered with plants, we would set a very beneficial sequence in motion.

This new plant life covering Australia, Arabia and, North Africa would absorb much of the world's carbon in the air that is the cause of global warming. We would definitely be "killing two birds with one stone", and really bettering the world in the process.

The main reason that Australia is so dry is that the winds, which might bring rain, are blocked by the Great Dividing Range of mountains, along the east coast of Australia. However, in east-central Australia lies the Great Artesian Basin. This is a vast area of low-lying land. Much of the basin is below sea level.

What if a canal could be dug, which would flood part of the Great Artesian Basin with sea water? This would form a vast, shallow salt-water reservoir west of the coastal mountains. This water would quickly re-evaporate in the dry climate to be carried westward by the prevailing winds.

It would fall as rain on the vast arid west of Australia. Plants would grow, and farming would thrive. The deserts would become grasslands and the continent would cease to be a source of a significant amount of dust to the region's large-scale weather patterns.

The area is sparsely populated anyway. This salt-water reservoir, covering hundreds of square kilometers would provide beaches and sites for resorts. Although it would not have the waves required for the Australian pastime of surfing. As fish-farming is becoming so popular across much of the world, the reservoir could be stocked with fish.

The reservoir would be shallow, and if Australians ever changed their minds about the project all that would be necessary is to close the canal and the water would not take long to evaporate.

The only drawback of the reservoir is that it would salinate the fresh water within it's shores. But this would be more than compensated for by the fresh water falling westward as rain.

The yellow line in the following image is where the canal would go that would fill the Great Artesian Basin with sea water. The vast dry Outback to the west would benefit when water that had evaporated from the basin fell as rain. Image from Google Earth.

I believe that it is an accident of geology which prevented Australia from being the lush and green land that it might have been. This project could really change the world.