That rooftop rain is just sweat, scaled up to a skyline, and the physics is the entire reason it works.
Water needs energy to become vapor, and a lot of it. Evaporating a single gram pulls about 2,260 joules of heat out of whatever it touches, which is why stepping out of a pool into a breeze makes you shiver in the middle of summer. The mist rig does that to a whole block of air at once.
The atomizing is the trick. Break one milliliter of water, about a fifth of a teaspoon, into 10-micron droplets and you get close to two billion of them, carrying more than a thousand times the surface area of the drop you started with. Evaporation only happens at the surface, so a thousand times more surface means the water flashes to vapor almost instantly and rips heat from the air before it ever reaches the ground.
Run the numbers and it barely spends any water. Cooling a cubic meter of hot air by 8°C means removing roughly 9.6 kilojoules. That works out to four grams of evaporated water. Less than a teaspoon drops a cubic meter by eight degrees, so one rooftop tank can chill a courtyard.
One condition decides whether any of this happens: the air has to be dry. Evaporative cooling depends on the surrounding air being thirsty enough to accept more vapor. Shanxi sits in China's dry continental interior, so the air drinks the mist and the temperature falls. Run the identical setup in Guangzhou or Miami and it does almost nothing, because saturated air has nowhere left to put the water.
Same reason a swamp cooler chills a Phoenix garage for pennies while a Houston one just makes it muggy. Same misters over Arizona restaurant patios. Same clay pot that keeps water cold in a village with no power line for miles.
The energy comparison is the kicker. An air conditioner has to pump heat uphill against the gradient with a compressor, which is why it eats electricity. This runs a water pump and lets a phase change do the work for a fraction of the watts. You pay in water instead of power, and only where the air is dry enough to take it.
@L33Ghost@SagittariusWl@elonmusk Musk deliberately closed one eye in the photo with Lei Jun, because opening both eyes would let Lei Jun use face ID to take out 'wangdai' (risky online loans) under Musk's name. Classic Chinese dark humor!
@L33Ghost@SagittariusWl@elonmusk This is a funny Chinese internet meme. When Lei Jun (founder of Xiaomi) took a selfie with Elon Musk, Musk winked and closed one eye. Chinese netizens joked that Musk was 'turning a blind eye' on purpose — because if he opened both eyes, Lei Jun could use the clear
@L33Ghost@SagittariusWl@elonmusk facial photo to apply for online loans (wangdai) in Musk's name using face recognition!
It's playing on the idiom 'zhēng yī zhī yǎn, bì yī zhī yǎn' (turn a blind eye / pretend not to see). Musk is 'smart' for only giving half his face!"