Airdrop irrigation?

[Seeria]

Anyone seen this gent and his invention?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...op-bright-idea

A video explaining how it works

YouTube

[sisterpine]

Wow! How cool is that. There are so many areas suffering for lack of crop water these days- bless him for thinking of it!

[artificer]

Its great if you're in an area with the unusual conditions of medium to high humidity, and little ground water. I know that my mom in NM complains about "high humidity" during the summer when its 35%. What was the humidity in Texas this last summer during the drought? If the humidity is low, I don't see how effective this will be.

Michael

[YuccaFlatsRanch]

Somewhere in South America they have a water vapor harvester that supplies whole towns. It sits on a hillside and is a mesh of small chain, 5-6 feet high that stretches for hundreds of yards. There is a trough under the chain that is connected to piping. The breeze blows water vapor through the chain at night cooling the chain and causing the water vapor to collect on the chain. It the drips down the chain mesh into the trough and flows to the town water storage.

[Harry Chickpea]

Do a search on "dew ponds". There was one passive design shown in Pop Mechanics and Pop Science back around the 1920s that had been developed in England and used in Australia. I went so far as to contact the historical society of the town in England to see if there had been any documentation on it or if there were remnants. No luck, technology lost, but I figured out part of how it worked.

Tall grasses are super-efficent dew harvesters and temperature moderators. The stalks slow and stop wind flow, the top parts shade the grass underneath for quite a while after dawn, and the ground in a field of tall grass is almost always more moist than one that has been mown.

[Txrider]

Originally Posted by artificer

Its great if you're in an area with the unusual conditions of medium to high humidity, and little ground water. I know that my mom in NM complains about "high humidity" during the summer when its 35%. What was the humidity in Texas this last summer during the drought? If the humidity is low, I don't see how effective this will be.

Michael

It would depend on where you are in Texas.. Out west humidity is real low, along the coast it's normally 80%+ even in droughts, central Texas it's more like 30-50% I believe. My pasture actually made it along on just the dew for a while this summer until it got over 100 degrees and the humidity fell enough that there wasn't so much dew..