Eli5: Why can’t can’t we just vacuum up clouds if they are just water vapor?
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They have volumes of Millions of cubic meters. Say a cloud 1 mile by 1 mile and half a mile thick would be roughly 2 billion cubic meters. And then water vapor is only about 4% of that. Not only would it take an immense amount of energy, So what’s your goal? To make the clouds go away?
You’d need a vacuum bag that same size, and a single vacuum cleaner would take about 1 billion minutes to suck up that volume of air. That’s about 1900 years. Make it 2000 vacuum cleaners, that would only take about a year to suck up the cloud. Use 4000kw, cost about 9 million dollars in electricity over that year.
And then we’re back to…What’s your goal? If it’s making the cloud go away it would have blown away already.
Compress/condense it into water? You could truck water, desalinate it from the ocean, pipe it from somewhere far more practically than sucking up clouds.
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