Here’s Why Experts Don’t Think Cloud Seeding Caused Dubai Flooding

With cloud seeding, it may rain, but it doesn’t really pour or flood — at least nothing like what drenched the United Arab Emirates and paralyzed Dubai, meteorologists said.

Cloud seeding , although decade old , is still controversial in the weather community , mostly because it has been hard to prove that it does very much . No one is reports report the type of flooding that on Tuesday douse the UAE , which often deploy the technology in an attempt to squeeze every drop of moisture from a sky that usually give less than 4 or 5 inch ( 10 to 13 centimeter ) of rain a year .

“It’s most certainly not cloud seeding,” said private meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If that occurred with cloud seeding, they’d have water all the time. You can’t create rain out of thin air per se and get 6 inches of water. That’s akin to perpetual motion technology.”

Dubai Floods Expose Weaknesses to a Rapidly Changing Climate

Meteorologists and climate scientists said the extreme rainfall is akin to what the world expects with human-caused climate change, and one way to know for certain that it was not caused by tinkering with clouds is that it was forecast days in advance. Atmospheric science researcher Tomer Burg pointed to computer models that six days earlier forecast several inches of rain — the typical amount for an entire year in the UAE.

Three low – pressure system form a train of storm slowly move along the jet stream — the river of air that move weather system — toward the Persian Gulf , say University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann is said . blame cloud seeding ignore the forecast and the cause , he is said say .

Many of the people point to cloud seeding are also climate change denier who are try to divert attention from what ’s really happen , Mann is said and other scientist say .

“When we talk about heavy rainfall, we need to talk about climate change. Focusing on cloud seeding is misleading,” said Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who heads a team that does rapid attribution of weather extremes to see if they were caused by global warming or not. “Rainfall is becoming much heavier around the world as the climate warms because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture.”

WHAT IS CLOUD SEEDING?

Clouds need tiny water or ice droplets called nuclei to make rain. The weather modification method uses planes and ground-based cannons to shoot particles into clouds making more nucleai, attracting moisture that falls as snow and rain. Usually silver iodide is used, but it can also be dry ice and other materials. The method, first pioneered in the 1940s, became popular in the U.S. West starting in the 1960s, mostly for snow.

It can’t create water from a clear sky — particles must be shot into a storm cloud that already holds moisture to get it to fall, or to fall more than it otherwise would naturally.

HOW EFFECTIVE IS IT?

A recent study is found of aerial seeding find a clear precipitation pattern on a radar that mirror the seeding and offer evidence the method work . But exactly how effective it is remain unclear , scientists is say say .

The physics make sense , but the result have been so small that scientist just ca n’t agree on whether it is fair to say it really work , say Maue is said and Mann .

Atmospheric forces are so huge and so chaotic that technically cloud seeding “is way too small a scale to create what happened,” Maue said. Extra rainfall from cloud seeding would have been minimal, both said.

WHO USES IT?

Despite not knowing its efficacy, governments in drought-stricken regions like the U.S. West and the UAE are often willing to invest in technology like seeding in the hopes of getting even a small amount of water.

Utah is estimates estimate cloud seeding help increase its water supply by 12 % in 2018 , accord to an analysis by the state ’s Division of Water Resources . The analysis is used used estimate provide to them by the contractor pay to do the seeding .

Dozens is use of country in Asia and the Middle East also use cloud seeding .

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spent $2.4 million last year on cloud seeding along the overtapped Colorado River. Utah recently increased its seeding budget by tenfold.

SO WHAT CAUSED THE DELUGE?

That part of the Middle East does n’t get many storm , but when it does , they are whopper that dwarf what people in the United States are used to , Maue is said say .

Huge tropical storms like this “are not rare events for the Middle East,” said University of Reading meteorology professor Suzanne Gray. She cited a recent study analyzing nearly 100 such events over the southern Arabian Peninsula from 2000 to 2020, with most in March and April, including a March 2016 storm that dropped 9.4 inches (almost 24 centimeters) on Dubai in just a few hours.

The 2021 study said “a statistically significant increase in the (whopper storms) duration over southeast Arabian Peninsula has been found, suggesting that such extreme events may be even more impactful in a warming world.”

While cloud seeding can work around the margins, it doesn’t do big things, scientists say.

“It’s maybe a little bit of a human conceit that, yeah, we can control the weather in like a Star Trek sense,” Maue, who was appointed to NOAA by then-President Donald Trump, said. “Maybe on long time scales, climate time scales, we’re affecting the atmosphere on long time scales. But when it comes to controlling individual rain storms, we are not anywhere close to that. And if we were capable of doing that, I think we would be capable of solving many more difficult problems than creating a rain shower over Dubai.”

Borenstein is reported report from Washington , Peterson from Boulder , Colorado .

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Photograph: Vehicles drive through standing floodwater caused by heavy rain in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Thursday, April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Christopher Pike)

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