Chapter 299 Parasol

Time has unknowingly come to the end of May.

In May this year, temperatures across East Asia were significantly higher than the same period in previous years.

For example, in Chongqing and Jiangcheng, which are known as the furnaces, the temperature exceeded 35 degrees Celsius in May this year.

On the bank of the Yangtze River, tourists coming and going in Hongyadong not only experience the spicy local hot pot, but also sweat profusely in the scorching summer heat.

From the top of Hongyadong, you can see the confluence of the sparkling Jialing River and the Yangtze River.

“It’s so hot…” A middle-aged man fanned himself with a flyer he received on the roadside while taking a sip of iced coffee: “Huh…”

“Yes! It’s so hot. I should have waited until the National Day holiday to travel here.” The female companion next to her also had a look of despair on her face. She held the cup of iced coffee against her forehead to cool down her dizzy head.

Just now.

They suddenly found that the surroundings suddenly darkened.

The middle-aged man raised his head, and then his eyes were attracted by the huge floating object in the air.

I saw that the sun in the west was blocked by a “white cloud”.

But if you look closely, you can find that this “white cloud” is a bit strange.

If you look down from outer space, you can see that there are more than a dozen highly reflective white mirrors around the entire urban area of ​​Chongqing.

But when looking up at the sky from the ground, you can only see a dozen relatively regular “white clouds” floating in the air.

These “white clouds” are the “Jellyfish Airships” developed by the Minqin Group, and they are an improved version of the Jellyfish Airship Type 3.

This type of airship has a very large airbag volume, which can reach nearly 300 billion cubic meters. It also has deployable airbags and photovoltaic panels. After deployment, it becomes a disc-shaped airship with a radius of about 1 kilometer.

The airship can be deployed to an area of ​​3.14 square kilometers.

Currently, there are 15 ships deployed around the urban area of ​​Chongqing, covering an area of ​​about 47.1 square kilometers.

The urban area of ​​Chongqing is about 5400 square kilometers, and these photovoltaic panels occupy about 0.87% of the area.

The area seems small, but in fact, these airships are not isolated, but can be combined with each other. Only 4 airships in four positions are fixed, and the remaining 11 jellyfish airships are movable. Therefore, after combining them, they can form a huge covered area of ​​nearly 30 square kilometers.

According to the diurnal system set up by the airship control center, these airships can continuously adjust their positions as the position of the sun changes.

The photovoltaic panels of these jellyfish airships are not black in the traditional sense, but specially designed white. Their purpose is to reflect sunlight and reflect part of it back into outer space.

The reason for doing this is that in recent years, the concentration of particulate matter in the Earth’s atmosphere has become increasingly higher, causing a lot of heat from sunlight to be absorbed by the atmosphere, thereby enhancing global warming.

Even though the North Atlantic warm current stopped flowing for a period of time in March, it caused the Arctic ice sheet to expand and increased the amount of sunlight reflected.

However, if we take into account the shrinking area of ​​the Antarctic ice sheet and the reduction of highland glaciers such as the Snowy Plateau, the amount of sunlight reflected by the Earth is actually much less than before. This, coupled with the increased heat absorption by particulate matter in the atmosphere, will still lead to continued global warming.

Chongqing’s current “sunshade plan” is designed to address the problem of heat accumulation in big cities during the summer.

As the assembled photovoltaic airships slowly moved along with the sun in the lower stratosphere, although the ground was not completely dark yet, the scene presented became similar to that of a cloudy day.

Without the direct sunlight, the entire central area of ​​the city has become cooler and the temperature is continuing to drop.

“Hey, why is it cloudy?”

“It seems like the clouds in the sky are blocking the sun.”

“That doesn’t look like a cloud, does it?”

“It might be those airships that flew over a while ago.”

Because the airship has a sun-tracking system and is in the stratosphere at an altitude of 1.1 meters, the shadow area on the ground will be magnified.

However, the enlargement of this shadow area can be roughly divided into three areas: one is the core shading area, one is the sub-shading area, and one is the edge shading area.

The cooling brought about by this method has just begun today, so the local daytime temperature has not been pushed below 30 degrees Celsius all at once. However, as time goes by, as long as it continues for a week or two, the ground will not absorb enough heat during the day, coupled with the heat lost at night, the local temperature will continue to drop until it reaches a new equilibrium point.

The Minqin Group is working with several domestic weather and climate research teams to study how to use this method to regulate the temperature in local areas.

Although the parasol plan will lead to insufficient lighting in the core urban area, especially from 10 am to 3 pm during the day, during which the core urban area is almost shrouded in shadows for six hours, this disadvantage is insignificant compared to the cool weather it brings.

If you really want to sunbathe, you can do it in the morning or evening, when the sunlight is soft and convenient for sunbathing.

As for the problem of drying clothes in the core urban area, Chongqing City has introduced a “temporary support plan for laundry rooms”. If you open a laundry room in Chongqing City, you can get special subsidies. However, this subsidy is not given directly in the form of money, but rather a certain amount of support in the form of electricity and water fee reductions.

In fact, supporting the laundry industry is also conducive to employment and absorbing excess labor in the private sector.

Anyway, the existence of photovoltaic airships has brought huge amounts of electricity to the entire city of Chongqing. A small portion of this electricity can be used to support the laundry industry and revitalize some industries.

at the same time.

Inside the temporary office building of the Parasol Project.

More than a dozen researchers are busy checking various data. They have obtained a lot of data through temperature sensors, wind sensors and other equipment installed throughout the urban area.

“Have you sorted out the data for this afternoon?”

A researcher wearing glasses gently turned his ergonomic chair and said, “It’s out, team leader. After three hours of sunshade in the afternoon, the temperature in the core area dropped by an average of 3.3 degrees Celsius, the sub-area dropped by an average of 2.1 degrees Celsius, and the edge area dropped by an average of 1.3 degrees Celsius.”

Team leader He Guangming stroked his stubble, then looked at the next workstation and said, “The monitoring team should keep paying attention.”

“receive.”

As the sun sets outside the window.

The temperature in the entire urban area is still dropping further.

After all, with three hours less sunlight, the ground temperature is definitely not as high as when the sun is shining on a sunny day.

Sure enough, it was around one in the morning.

After a nap, He Guangming got up to check the data and saw that the temperature in the city had dropped below 30 degrees Celsius and was currently around 29.1 degrees Celsius. The experiment is still going on.

After a week of continuous shading tests, the temperature in Chongqing city has dropped a lot, from 38 degrees Celsius to around 31 degrees Celsius during the day, and from 32 degrees Celsius to 26 degrees Celsius at night.

“Hello, Professor Li.”

Li Anhua, a climatologist who had hurriedly flown over from Beijing, nodded to He Guangming and the others: “Hello, Team Leader He, how is the situation now?”

He Guangming had already sorted out this week’s test data and handed it directly to Li Anhua: “Professor Li, this is the test report.”

Li Anhua took the document and asked as he read it, “Is there any data on the surrounding areas?”

“Yes, in the second half of the report, we have installed monitoring equipment in every area within a 100-kilometer radius.”

“The temperature drop in the core area is very obvious!” Li Anhua’s eyes were filled with thought. The parasol plan is essentially a derivative application of the photovoltaic power generation system, but this thing cannot be promoted casually.

The current testing in Chongqing is just a test.

After all, blocking sunlight over a large area will cause the ground temperature to drop, which will change the local climate. Climate is not a completely independent system, but a global integrated system. Changing the local climate may cause further anomalies in the global climate.

But there is no way. In recent years, global climate changes have been erratic and extreme weather has occurred frequently.

The country has to consider some issues for the future.

During this week’s test, there was no need to turn on the air conditioner at night in the urban area of ​​Chongqing, which saved a lot of electricity.

Not turning on the air conditioner at night further reduces the waste heat emissions from the air conditioner. Without the warming caused by the waste heat from the air conditioner at night, the warming of the surface by sunlight during the next day will become less obvious.

Of course, Li Anhua is very clear that this method of regulating temperature is only limited to summer. If it is winter, the photovoltaic airships must be dispersed and the daily system cannot be turned on to leave enough daytime accumulated temperature on the ground.

Moreover, this project must be tracked over a long period of time and cannot be promoted all at once. It is now only being tested in Chongqing. Even if it interferes with the local climate, it is only a minor problem. If any adverse side effects occur, these photovoltaic airships can be removed.

If it is promoted nationwide at once, if it causes the climate to get out of control, the consequences will affect the whole world.

After reading the second half of the test report, Li Anhua showed an expression of “as expected”, “Some of the heat from the surrounding high-temperature areas has been absorbed here, especially the water temperature in the Three Gorges Reservoir area, which has dropped significantly in recent days. It seems that when the Jialing River and the Yangtze River passed through Chongqing, some of the heat was absorbed by the local area.”

“Yes, that’s what we judged too.” He Guangming nodded slightly.

Li Anhua thought for a while and suggested: “The temperature is just right now. There is no need to continue to increase the scale of photovoltaic airships. We can only wait and see.”

He Guangming also responded readily: “My colleagues and I think so too. After all, the local temperature has dropped to a relatively comfortable range. It would be inappropriate to drop further.”

Li Anhua clapped his hands on the test report and said, “I have to go back to Beijing in a few days. Let’s take advantage of the time to study the data and climate model simulations in the next few days, shall we?”

“no problem.”

Participants in the Parasol Project studied the data silently.

The temperature change in Chongqing not only allows local people to enjoy free air conditioning, but also makes many people from nearby towns and foreign tourists linger here.

After all, as June is approaching, temperatures in the Yangtze River Basin are soaring. Even in the northern region, temperatures in many places have broken historical records for the same period.

At this time, the temperature in Chongqing, which remains between 26 and 32 degrees Celsius throughout the day, naturally becomes an artificial summer resort.

Even though there was a heat wave all around, the temperature in Chongqing did not soar.

After all, a large part of the local sunlight is reflected into outer space by photovoltaic airships. This heat does not bring warming to the ground, while the heat exchanged through airflow in the surrounding areas is subject to exchange limitations.

In particular, Chongqing is a mountain city with a river valley terrain and is surrounded by mountains and plateaus, which further limits the heat from surrounding areas from flowing into the local area.

However, considering that there are some risks and public pressure in changing the local climate, the official did not announce the parasol plan, but used solar power generation as an excuse to package this project.

In fact, after seeing the success of Chongqing, many hot cities had ideas. They sent people to discuss cooperation with Minqin Group and Blue Whale Airship Company, but were all rejected.

It’s not a complete rejection, but a rejection of deploying large areas of solar photovoltaic airships, after all, this will change the surface climate.

The higher authorities also issued serious warnings to all places that were ready to take action, asking them to develop solar energy scientifically and pay attention to the climate impacts brought about by photovoltaic airships.

This dispelled the idea of ​​many places.

Before we knew it, June had quietly arrived.

However, June this year is destined to be an unstable season.

Because the sea temperature of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere has soared, especially in East Asia and Southeast Asia, which were hit by three super typhoons in May. As June just arrived, two typhoon embryos were formed on the sea near the Mariana Trench.

Judging from the current sea temperature, these typhoon embryos will soon absorb the surrounding heat and form super typhoons.

If we say that East Asia and Southeast Asia are experiencing a series of typhoons.

Southern North America is facing the sweep of super hurricanes, while northern and western North America are facing the worst drought and high temperatures in history.

That’s right, the cold wave had just subsided, and North America was hit by high temperatures and drought again. It was like heaven and hell, leaving no time for transition at all.

At the same time, the ice sheet in the Arctic Circle is also melting rapidly, and coupled with the fact that the Antarctic ice sheet has not expanded in a timely manner, the global sea level is rising rapidly, and it is estimated that it will rise by about one to two meters this year.

This is a fatal problem for most low-lying coastal areas.

It can only be said that the climate variables accumulated since the industrial age of mankind are erupting in recent years.

Many small island countries in the Pacific Ocean are almost submerged.

Various climate changes are gradually squeezing human living space.

In the face of nature, human beings are still too small.

Of course, this does not mean that humans are powerless to fight back, but many of the methods currently used by humans are full of uncertainty. Once an operation error occurs, the situation may become worse.

This is also the fundamental reason why the parasol plan was not promoted immediately.

(End of this chapter)