How to Dehumidify D.C.

This year is an exception. Every other year in D.C. around this time the air is so thick with water vapor that it feels like you're slowly drowning every time you breath. It weighs down on you, maybe in meager amounts, but enough to slowly erode any will towards movement during the day. It causes vegetation to grow at such a rate that it pushes up through the brick sidewalks and turns them into roller coaster tracks. Mold is everywhere. Same with mosquitos and ants and other insects that thrive in this climate. It ranks up there among destructive forces with time, nuclear weapons, heroin, and West coast slang.

Air conditioning is highly recommended, but it's expensive. Probably costs the city and it's residents untold millions of dollars in energy therms every year. If something could be done on a larger scale to affect the climate, it could be a boon to life in the district in so many ways. Sure, a few people out there might scoff at altering god's handywork or following in the bizarre, money-wasting footsteps of the Army Corps of Engineers, but the benefits are too great to ignore.

From my limited knowledge of climatology, I believe most of the source comes from D.C. being in a slightly tropical climate at a relatively low elevation and a hilly topography between the Appalachians and the ocean. There's a lot of moisture from the Potomac river and the Atlantic Ocean, but the wind can't take the moisture away since it's blocked in by the mountains or the hilly local topography that make up the Potomac River valley. The low elevation means heavy pressure which keeps the moisture in place. It's warm enough so that most of the water doesn't condense. Combine this with D.C.'s heavy traffic problem and it makes the air a stagnent mess.

Possible solutions I've thought of are thus:

• Use of dehumidification silicate on a large scale - Dehumidification silicate is a substance used in shoe boxes and basements as a cheap way to condense water from air. It's very slow and only works in small quantities. If used on a massive scale, say on 80% of the rooftops throughout the city, it might have a reasonable effect.
• Cloud Seeding - Constant cloud seeding seems to be what's happening right now - lots and lots of rain. In the days after a rainstorm, humidity usually drops to much more endurable levels. Who knows what the consequences of this sort of weather tampering might be in the long run? (Heavy erosion?)
• Terraformation - Terraforming the landscape sounds scary, but chances are that cloud seeding might have a more disastrous effect - it depends how much needs to be changed. We can't really knock down the Appalachian mountains, nor would we want to. Locations in the city that are at a local maximum (tops of hills) still have a reasonable amount of humidity but have a decent amount of wind. Not enough wind to really move out the moisture but enough to make things a bit more endurable. Future developments could fill in valleys to plane the surface flat allowing for more wind. It's not a great solution, especially from an aesthetic standpoint, but still a possibility.

—August 17th, 2004

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