The intensity of the rain was record breaking, but this is consistent with a warming climate, with more moisture available to fuel storms and make heavy rainfall events and associated flooding progressively more potent,
Even if cloud seeding did encourage clouds around Dubai to drop water, the atmosphere would have likely been carrying more water to form clouds in the first place, because of climate change
When such intense and large scale systems are forecasted, cloud seeding - which is a costly process - is not performed because [there is] no need to seed such strong systems of regional scale,
This part of the world is characterised by long periods without rain and then irregular, heavy rainfall, but even so, this was a very rare rainfall event,
If humans continue to burn oil, gas and coal, the climate will continue to warm, rainfall will continue to get heavier, and people will continue to lose their lives in floods,
There need to be strategies and adaptation measures to [adapt to] this new reality [of more frequent and intense rainfall],
Ahead of the event, computer models (that don't factor in potential cloud seeding effects) were already predicting well over a year's worth of rain to fall in around 24 hours,
The weather situation has been very strong in the entire region,
Extremely strong winds and downdrafts caused moisture-laden clouds that had developed south of Oman and in Saudi Arabia, to suddenly move over the UAE. They came in two very strong waves on Monday and Tuesday causing heavy rainfall and thunderstorms, as we had analysed,
Expect a gradual increase in temperatures over the coming days,
No, there was no cloud seeding done,
We monitored the situation well in advance,
Many apartments in our building were damaged. Every time it rains heavily, we experience water leakage, despite maintenance. This time, luckily it was not from the electricity box like last time. Still I was scared because there was a lot of water and I have a dog at home. When I went down to the security, they gave me the contact of a neighbour called Fares. He was so helpful. He literally created a way for the water to come from the ceiling directly to the sink,
She was returning from work. With no sign of movement after four hours, she was desperate for a way home. I decided to call Nasir, and within one hour, he sent a driver to take over her car. The driver came on foot!,
It was a crucial task even though the distance was shorter. I picked them up around 2am and it took me around one and a half-hour to drop them off in Karama,
My colleague Debbie was driving the car, which was our boss’ car. He was kind to give us his SUV because we were scared to use Debbie’s hatchback. But, we couldn’t get on to Al Ain Road from Zabeel area. We tried for a long time and finally when we realised that we were going to be stranded and submerged, we decided to knock on the door of a villa,
They were standing in the flooded road near Dubai Mall. That uncle was shivering. They couldn’t speak English properly. But they somehow understood that I was offering them a free lift. Then I dropped them off to their hotel in Mankhool,
I was picking up and dropping off people till early this morning. I slept for a few hours and I am back on the streets to do the same,
We offered this community support as a small gesture to ease the burden of people needing a hand during tough times. We are happy to have got them covered with free and safe parking at our two centres in Al Nahda and Muhaisnah till Thursday evening,
The NCM has established a national network of 86 automatic weather stations (AWOS) for weather monitoring, six weather radars covering the entire UAE, and one upper air station.