This had me wondering: what would happen if you removed the water and just kept the effect but tweak it to look like heat distortion? I could see a lot of use with this if it actually were to happen.
Roblox would need to give us access to refraction and normal maps for custom materials to make this happen. Normal mapping is currently on the Trello to-do list so we may have this in the future.
Should be added that this won’t be for a while, because it has been moved to rejected for now since they didn’t see much chance of it happening in the upcoming year.