Surely the salt falling on the farmland would have some kind of deleterious effects, right? I imagine you’re not trying to grow sea cucumbers in this scenario, and I’m not sure most land plants would be crazy about a ton of salt.

Just ask the Carthaginians…

I believe that when every spec of salt creates a far larger water droplet - and the overall concentration in rain ends up tiny.

If anything, doing lots of this might reduce the salt concentration in soils, due to increased rainfall.

That’s probably what the antediluvian civilization said before they tried it in North Africa! ;)

I guess what I’m forgetting is that the water has a chance to wash salt away back to the ocean. But how much salt does one drip of water absorb? What if the spec of salt that starts in the water droplet is as much as the droplet can wash away?

I suppose it must be slowly becoming clear that I have no idea what I’m talking about (save for a nickel worth of Roman history).

This is what happened with Aral Sea.

It might just cause earlier rainfall, not more of it. There's x amount of water in the atmosphere, and you can't add more by spraying salt crystals.

You can though. The amount of precipitation (averaged over a long enough period of time) is inversely proportional to the amount of evaporation and other water entering the atmosphere (averaged over a long enough period of time). Note that the two things being compared are _rates_ not _masses_. If all you do is cause water to fall sooner then:

1. The humidity in the air drops, increasing evaporation rates because of the lower partial pressure of water vapor in the air.

2. The humidity on the surface increases (dusty areas becoming moist, plant leaves uncurling to expose more surface area for other processes but incidentally increasing evaporation rates, reservoirs having more surface area, ...), increasing the evaporation rate.

There are limits of course, and that back-of-the-napkin analysis ignores 2nd-order changes in temperature and all of the other hairier bits of climate modeling, but it illustrates that things are more complicated than they appear anwyway.

Edit: "inverse" here just meaning a multiplication by -1

Ah yes, that actually makes sense. Making the air drier speeds up the entire water cycle, thus more rainfall.

It would be interesting to have a water cycle simulation with sliders.

Would this be worth doing straight from seawater? I.e. place enormous solar/wind powered rigs in the ocean to spray massive volumes of seawater into the air? What would be the effect (beneficial and otherwise) of that?