Dubai Floods, Is Artificial Cloud Seeding the Culprit?

JAKARTA – The city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates was completely paralyzed after heavy rain in just 24 hours. Cloud seeding is suspected to be the cause.

Launching Interesting Engineering, Thursday (18/4/2024), several media linked this flood to cloud seeding activities that Dubai routinely carries out to meet its clean water needs. An airplane is routinely used to disperse chemicals and small particles, such as potassium chloride salt, into rain clouds to increase precipitation.

According to Ahmed Habib, a meteorologist at the National Center for Meteorology (NCM), the country engages in cloud-seeding activities in the days before the rain. Planes depart from Al Ain Airport every Monday and Tuesday to seed convective clouds that have formed in the area.

Since the news was published, social media users have been sharing pictures and videos of the floods and blaming the seeding exercise. While it is easy to link the two incidents and blame the flooding on artificial cloud seeding, a deeper look into the reality tells a different story.

Cloud seeding nothing new for Dubai . The Bloomberg report states that this technique has been used since 2002 and has never shown very bad results in the previous two decades.

Some people believe the seeding experiments were not wrong as Dubai carries out around 300 such operations every year. NCM also explained that they did not conduct cloud seeding the day the storm hit. Although cloud seeding sounds like a victory for humans over one of nature’s forces, the technique can only increase rain production by about 25 percent.

In other words, human intervention cannot create rain when there are no rain clouds in the sky. Even if there is increased rainfall in Dubai, the role of cloud seeding in this is relatively small, and the region will receive most of that rainfall with or without seeding.

According to a Wired report, cloud seeding has very local effects. Most of the exercises in the UAE are carried out in the eastern part of the region and away from Dubai. Additional evidence is that Oman also experiences excessive rainfall even though it does not carry out cloud seeding.

Reasons for Dubai Flooding

The answer to this question is simple. Dubai was not built to handle such large amounts of rainfall. As a desert city seeking increased supplies of fresh water, Dubai did not build stormwater drains to remove additional water during the relentless rains.

The city is built with concrete and glass and has no infrastructure to absorb excess water. With climate change, it is common to see large cities submerged when there is excessive rain. This condition is another reminder that urban infrastructure must be designed taking into account climate change and its impact on the natural environment and humans.

In Dubai, flooding caused schools to close, and employees were directed to work from home after underground parking was flooded. Metro services were also disrupted after two days of heavy rain. Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, faced significant disruption, with flights either diverted or delayed for several hours. The damage was not limited to the city itself. 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.

(msf)