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Cloud seeding involves spraying salt into incoming storm clouds to increase rainfall.
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Photos show how the UAE, the United States, and other countries have been seeding clouds for years.
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Historical flooding in Dubai has not been caused by cloud seeding, but human climatic influences have played a role.
As the deserted city of Dubai flooded on Monday, onlookers pointed the finger at the government’s “cloud seeding” efforts.
The program sends planes into storm clouds to inject them with substances that will help make more rain. Could it be the culprit of two years’ worth of rain falling on a United Arab Emirates city in one day?
It’s a tantalizing explanation. Trying to control the weather is like playing God. And if thousands of years of media and oral tradition tell us anything—from Prometheus to Frankenstein—playing god has dire consequences.
But the United Arab Emirates has been seeding clouds to trigger a rain and drought battle for 20 years. Some US states have been doing it for even longer. These programs have found that the practice has a small impact on precipitation, increasing it by about 5 to 15%, although a UAE official told Reuters it could be as high as 30% for them.
Many other countries, including China and Australia, have tried the technique.
According to some scientists, cloud seeding is not the driving force behind Dubai’s historic floods.
How cloud seeding works
To “seed” a cloud, you have to spray it with microscopic salt particles such as silver iodide, calcium chloride, or potassium chloride.
In the UAE and many US states, planes do the work. In some places, like Utah, machines on the ground put the substance into air currents that can carry it into the clouds.
All these particles, like ice, have a crystalline structure that gives water droplets something to stick to. As the water collects, it forms ice crystals and falls as snow or rain.
This mimics the natural rain-making process that occurs within the cloud.
“Cloud seeding cannot create clouds from nothing. It encourages water that is already in the sky to condense faster and release water in certain places. So, first, you need moisture. Without it, there would be no clouds there,” Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, and co-founder of the pioneering science collaboration World Weather Attribution, in a statement to the Science Media Center (SMC).
The real threat behind the Dubai floods
Many atmospheric scientists rejected the idea that cloud seeding was behind the Dubai floods. Experts told the SMC that the rain came from a rare thundercloud system, which was already predicted to bring heavy rain, and the effect of any cloud seeding would be tiny.
“This is a distraction from the real story here – that because of our collective failure to phase out fossil fuels, we must prepare for unprecedented extremes, which will worsen until we reach ‘net zero,'” John Marsham, atmospheric scientist and Met. The Co-Chair of the Office at the University of Leeds told the SMC.
Global temperatures are rising as a result of heavier rainfall across the planet, even in places that are normally dry or even in the middle of a drought. This kind of weather whiplash happens because of a basic fact of physics: Warmer air holds more water.
“Any cloud seeding would have little effect in these circumstances,” Marsham said.
In fact, the UAE is not the only desert or drought region that has been devastated by heavy rains in recent years. Death Valley was catastrophically and historically flooded in 2022, 2023, and in February of this year.
A series of moisture-laden atmospheric rivers disrupted California’s years-long drought last winter, killing at least 22 people, according to the Los Angeles Times’ count.
“If people continue to burn oil, gas, and coal, the climate will continue to warm, the rain will continue to get heavier, and people will continue to lose their lives in floods,” Otto said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
