Is evaporative cooling more efficient with dry or moist air?

I live in India, and in the summer season, the temperature can reach up to $$45 \sideset{^\circ}{}{\mathrm{C}} .$$ We use Split 1.5 Ton AC in our small office. The idea is to put an evaporative cooler on the inlet side of the heat exchanger of AC to give it more efficient cooling.

Will it help to increase efficiency? or COP? By how much?

• The Evaporative cooler wiki page has the following sentence in the introduction: For example, an evaporative cooler may be designed to cool the coils of a large air conditioning or refrigeration system to increase its efficiency. – BMS May 24 '14 at 9:02
• It depends what you're trying to cool. Evaporating water into the dry output of an air conditioner will reduce the absolute temperature, which is good for cooling machines. But the reduced evaporation of sweat will cancel the effect for humans, and the added humidity may have negative side-effects like mildew. – Blackbody Blacklight May 24 '14 at 9:10
• Sure. It is thus a two-stage. If you have questions on the details of efficiency or design, you might modify this question, or ask another. In my time here, I haven't found a string community for handling the details of HVAC systems, but focused areas of the HVAC process might get hook those with enough experience in the physical sciences. – New Alexandria May 28 '14 at 13:02
• iamgopal, read the wiki page that BMS linked you to. Also, if possible, you don't want to increase the humidity of the air entering the air conditioner, and the wiki page gives details about how to do that. – David White Aug 10 at 20:28
• What’s the typical relative humidity of outside air? – Bob Jacobsen Aug 11 at 1:39