Did cloud seeding drown Dubai?
Did cloud seeding drown Dubai?Eel under the Rock - Apr 23, 2024
Dubai conducted cloud seeding exercises for two consecutive days before the floods. Have we crossed the line?
The city of Dubai is paralyzed after torrential rains hit the region in 24 hours, the entire year's rainfall.
Schools were closed and employees were asked to work from home after underground parking lots were flooded. Metro services were also disrupted after two days of downpours. Dubai International Airport, one of the world's busiest, is facing significant disruption with flights diverted or delayed for several hours.
The damage is not limited to the city. Roads in the capital, Abu Dhabi, were also flooded, while a 70-year-old man lost his life when his vehicle was caught in flash floods in Ras Al Khaimah.
In neighboring Oman, 19 people, including schoolchildren, died after days of consecutive rains flooded communities, local media reported.
Triggered by cloud seeding?
Many media outlets have attributed the flooding to the cloud-seeding activities that Dubai regularly engages in to meet its freshwater needs.
Under this approach, planes are used to introduce chemicals and small particles, such as potassium chloride salts, into rain clouds to increase precipitation.
According to Ahmed Habib, a specialist meteorologist at the National Center of Meteorology (NCM), the state carried out cloud seeding in the days preceding the rains. Planes were sent from Al Ain airport on Monday and Tuesday to seed convective clouds that had formed over the region, Bloomberg reported.
Since this news was published, users have taken to social media to share images and videos of the flooding and have blamed the seeding exercises for the flooding.
Should we blame cloud seeding?
While it is easy to correlate the two incidents and blame the flooding on the seeding exercises, a closer look at the reality reveals a different story.
Cloud seeding is not new to Dubai. The Bloomberg report states that this technique has been used since 2002 and has never had such disastrous results in the previous two decades. We can be sure that the seeding experiments did not go wrong this time since Dubai conducts around 300 such operations every year. The NCM also clarified that it did not carry out cloud seeding on the day of the storm.
