Was the great Dubai deluge caused by men ‘seeding the clouds’?
DUBAI was recovering yesterday from the worst deluge since records began there in 1949.
A year and a half of rain fell in a single day on the desert city-state, flooding roads and buildings.
Scores of cars were submerged and abandoned while floodwater was seen cascading ankle-deep through shopping centres.
Experts are questioning whether Tuesday’s ‘historic weather event’ in the United Arab Emirates might have been caused by cloud seeding.
Since the early 1990s, the region has used this method to boost annual rainfall and top up its supplies of drinking water.
The technique works by releasing salt flares into promising clouds, which causes supercooled water to condense and fall as rain.
It is believed the UAE operates around 1,000 hours of seeding flights
Poor drainage system blamed
each year. In some cases, the process can be done by firing seeding missiles from the ground.
Dubai International Airport has 3.73 ins of rain on average each year, but on Tuesday 5.59in fell in 24 hours.
Ahmed Habib, a meteorologist, told Bloomberg that several cloud-seeding planes were in action in the days before the deluge. However, the UAE’s National Centre for Meteorology insists this was not the case.
Other experts have also rubbished claims that the seeding method caused the floods, with scientists blaming climate change instead for more intense and frequent storms and floods around the world.
Some have also suggested that Dubai’s poor drainage system may have made the situation worse.
Giles Harrison, professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Reading, said: ‘The UAE does do operational cloud seeding, but there is huge difference between what this can achieve – targeting individual, developing clouds with seeding material released from an aircraft – and the Dubai rainfall, which was associated with a large weather system advancing across the region.
‘There is such a fundamental mismatch of scale in the processes involved that I can’t see how the rainfall and cloud seeding could be related.
‘And there would also be no reason to attempt cloud seeding in these circumstances, given the advance forecast of heavy rain.
‘An increase in atmospheric moisture with a warmer climate has long been expected to lead to more extreme rainfall events.’
Other experts argued the technique can increase seasonal rainfall by only up to 30%. Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have also seen heavy rainfall. In neighbouring Oman at least 18 people were killed, including ten schoolchildren swept away in a vehicle with an adult.
In Ras al-Khaimah, the UAE’s northernmost emirate, a 70-year-old man died when his vehicle was washed away by the floods.
Dubai airport yesterday advised travellers against coming there unless absolutely necessary.