by Record rainfall was said to have caused “real carnage” in Dubai on Tuesday – with schools closed, flights suspended and people working from home.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) city was drenched by more than 14cm (5.6 inches) of rain on Tuesday – the heaviest since records began in 1949, the state-run WAM news agency said.
As people in Dubai continue to apply Because of the downpour, some have suggested that a human-made practice known as “cloud seeding” may have caused the rain.
Here we look at what the process is all about and whether it was responsible for Dubai’s wet Tuesday.
What is cloud seeding?
The practice is a type of weather modification process where small planes fly through clouds burning salt flares and can increase the precipitation to make it rain.
The UAE, located in one of the hottest and driest regions in the world, is leading the effort to seed clouds and increase precipitation.
Was cloud seeding the cause of the storm?
After the downpour, some reports cited meteorologists at the National Meteorological Center, the UAE’s meteorological agency, as saying they had flown six or seven cloud seeding flights ahead of the rain.
Flight tracking data showed that one aircraft linked to the UAE’s cloud seeding efforts flew across the country on Sunday.
However, the meteorological agency told Reuters news agency that there were no such operations before the storm.
It comes as some experts also said cloud seeding was unlikely to have caused the downpour.
What have the experts said?
Sky News weather producer Chris England said he suspected cloud seeding contributed to the spill, as evidence the practice is working is “pretty slim at best”.
He added: “Several studies have indicated that climate change will increase rainfall in the area.”
Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, also said it was misleading to talk about cloud seeding as the cause of the rain.
“Cloud seeding cannot create clouds out of nothing. It encourages water already in the sky to condense faster
and released water in some places. So first, you need moisture,” she said.
“Without him, there would be no clouds.”
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Ms Otto also said that as the climate warms, rain is becoming much heavier around the world because there is more moisture in a warmer atmosphere.
Professor John Marsham, co-chair of the Office of Meteorology at the University of Leeds, said speculation about cloud seeding is “an emphasis on the real story here”.
“We know that man-made climate increases rainfall – this is well understood in physics because warm air holds more water.
“A rainfall event like the one that caused the Dubai floods, which covered a large area and dropped a year’s worth of rain in a single day over Dubai, cannot occur without large-scale weather conditions driving massive convergence of water vapor in the atmosphere. and heavy rain like that.
“Any possible effect of any cloud seeding in these circumstances would be tiny.”
Professor Maarten Ambaum, a meteorologist at the University of Reading who has studied rainfall patterns in the Gulf region, said: “The UAE has an operational cloud seeding program to increase rainfall in this high altitude part of the world, however there is none. there is technology that could create or even significantly modify this type of rainfall event.”
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If it wasn’t cloud seeding – what caused the storm?
Professor Ambaum said the UAE is characterized by long periods without rain and then “irregular, heavy rains”.
He said: “These storms appear to be the result of a mesoscale convective system – a series of medium-sized thunderstorms caused by large thunderclouds, formed as heat draws moisture up into the atmosphere. These can produce large amounts of rain, and when they occur over a wide area and one after the other, they can quickly lead to very heavy spills leading to surface water flooding, as we’ve seen in places like Dubai airport.”
Meanwhile, climate scientists say rising global temperatures, caused by human-driven climate change, are leading to more extreme weather events around the world, including intense rainfall.
Esraa Alnaqbi, a senior forecaster at the UAE’s National Meteorological Centre, has said climate change is likely to have contributed to the storm.
She said the downpour in Dubai came after a low pressure system in the upper atmosphere and low pressure at the surface acted as a pressure “squeeze” on the air.
That pressure, boosted by the contrast between warmer temperatures at ground level and cooler temperatures higher up, created the conditions for the powerful thunderstorm, she said.
