What's cloud seeding, and is flooding in Dubai a result of it?

What's cloud seeding, and is flooding in Dubai a result of it?

Over the last 24 hours, record-breaking rains in Dubai have given rise to false rumors about cloud seeding.

In what ways was the rainfall extraordinary, and what caused the heavy downpours?

How much of a downpour did it make?

Dubai is a coastal city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that has mostly dry weather. Although the average annual rainfall is less than 100mm (3.9in), there are sporadic, intense downpours.

Less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Dubai, in the city of Al-Ain, around 256 millimeters (10 inches) of rain fell in a single day.

Travelers stuck in Dubai claim, "We're living on duty free."

Airport mayhem in Dubai as a devastating storm rips across the Gulf

The primary culprit was a "cut off" low pressure weather system that pulled warm, humid air in and prevented other weather systems from passing through.

Prof. Maarten Ambaum, a meteorologist at the University of Reading who has researched rainfall patterns in the Gulf area, says, "This part of the world is characterised by long periods without rain followed by something irregular, heavy rainfall, but even so, this happened to be a very rare rainfall event."

In a single day, there was more than double the annual rainfall predicted.

What part did the changing climate play?

It is now impossible to pinpoint the precise impact that climate change had. It might take many months to conduct a thorough scientific investigation of both natural and human influences.

However, the record rainfall makes sense given the way the climate is evolving.

Simply said, warmer air has the capacity to contain more moisture, around 7% more for every degree Celsius of warmth. This increased moisture content may lead to heavier rains.

Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, says, "The intensity of the rain was record breaking, but this is according to a warming climate, with more moisture readily accessible to fuel storms and make heavy rainfall events that result in flooding more potent."

According to a recent research, if global warming continues, yearly rainfall across a large portion of the United Arab Emirates may rise by as much as 30% by the end of the century.

According to Dr. Friederike Otto, senior professor in climate science at Imperial College London, "if humans continue to burn energy sources such as coal, oil, and gas, the climate will continue to warm, rainfall will continue to get heavier, while individuals will continue to lose their lives in floods."

What's cloud seeding, and was it involved?

By modifying current clouds, cloud seeding helps to increase the amount of rain that falls.

One way to do this is to use airplanes to drop tiny particles into clouds, such as silver iodide. Then, it will be easier for water vapor to condense and transform into rain.

The UAE has recently used the method, which has been around for decades, to deal with water scarcity.

Some social media users incorrectly linked the harsh weather in the hours after the floods to recent cloud seeding efforts in the nation.

According to earlier reports from Bloomberg, cloud seeding aircraft were used on Sunday and Monday, but not on Tuesday during the floods.

Experts claim that emphasizing cloud seeding is "misleading" and that, at most, it would have had little impact on the storm, even though the BBC has not been able to independently confirm when cloud seeding occurred.

According to Dr. Otto, even in the unlikely event that cloud seeding succeeded in getting clouds above Dubai to rain, the atmosphere would have been carrying more water to create clouds in the first place due to climate change.

When there is not enough wind, moisture, or dust to cause rain, cloud seeding is often used. Forecasters had alerted us to a significant chance of flooding across the Gulf in the previous week.

Prof. Diana Francis, the head of Khalifa University's Environmental and Geophysical Sciences department in Abu Dhabi, states that "cloud seeding, which is an expensive process, is not performed when such intense and large scale systems will be driven because [there is] no need to seed such strong systems of regional scale."

There are four ways that climate change impacts severe weather.

Why is the global temperature rising?

Matt Taylor, a meteorologist with BBC Weather, said that the extreme weather event had been predicted beforehand. "Ahead of the event, computer models (that don't account for in potential cloud seeding effects) were already estimating well over a year's worth of rain to fall in around 24 hours," according to him.

"The impacts were much wider than I would expect from the seeding of cloud alone too - severe flooding impacting enormous regions from Bahrain to Oman."

A government task force called the National Center of Meteorology (NCM) oversees cloud seeding operations inside Emirati territory.

How ready is the United Arab Emirates for heavy rains?

Strong defenses that can withstand abrupt, powerful downpours are necessary to stop heavy rains from developing into devastating floods.

Naturally, Dubai is very urbanized. Because there isn't much green area to absorb the liquid, the drainage systems couldn't handle the heavy rains.

"There need to be strategies as well as adaptation measures to [adapt to] this new reality [of higher levels of intensity and frequency rainfall]," says Prof. Francis.

"For example, the arrangement of roads and facilities need to be adapted to, building reservoirs to store the moisture of spring rain and use it later in the year."

The UAE's Road and Transport Authority established a new division in January to assist with flood management in Dubai.