It has been impossible to walk anywhere outdoors in Qatar this week without the body breaking into a fevered sweat in the 100F heat with 80% humidity. But at the new Al Janoub Stadium, the world’s first purpose-built air conditioned football ground, it was a pleasant 70F in the stands and on the pitch, even at the hottest point of the day.
Watching the bemused looks from English journalists was Dr Saud Abdul Ghani, the Sudan-born mechanical engineer behind the groundbreaking air cooling technology that will also be used at the world athletics championships when they begin on Friday and at the 2022 World Cup.
“You are living inside a controlled micro-climate bubble,” he explained excitedly, pointing to the tiny grills under each seat and the 170 turrets at the side of the pitch blasting out freezing air.
“Pumping out cold air is a bit crude,” he continued, making a “pfft!” sound like a magician, “and then God will just make that disappear. So, we pump the exact amount of cold air in the exact place and then recycle it all the time. We never throw it away. There are grills on the floor. We take it from the top and recycle it back.”
Ghani, who is known locally as Dr Cool, then pointed to the seats. “If you look at the diffuser underneath you, you can see funny angles. This has been designed for the air to miss you and not to hit you, hug you gently and engulf you. Make a bubble!”
The temperature in the stadium can be brought down to as low as 44F, although the irony is that while the technology was designed to let Qatar host a summer World Cup, it will not necessarily be needed in November and December when the temperatures are much cooler. However Ghani believes it will stop the stadiums becoming white elephants once the tournament is over.
“This air-conditioned stadium will be used as women’s clubs, kids’ clubs, recreation areas for people to have events,” he said. “We don’t want any white elephants where you play a game every month and then the stadium is shut. We want these to be magnets for the community as a legacy case.”
Ghani would not divulge the cost of the system but admitted it led to the stadiums being two to three times more expensive than would otherwise be the case. And he pointed out the technology would most likely be rolled out globally in the future. “The Chinese will be very interested because they have their Olympic Games coming, as will the Americans and Mexicans. And with global warming – Paris and London were over 100F – even Europeans need to look at this carefully.”
