It's maybe a little bit of a human conceit that, yeah, we can control the weather in like a Star Trek sense,
When we talk about heavy rainfall, we need to talk about climate change. Focusing on cloud seeding is misleading,
It's most certainly not cloud seeding,
You don’t need cloud seeding’s influence to account for the record deluge in Dubai,
We did not engage in any seeding operations during this particular weather event. The essence of cloud seeding lies in targeting clouds at an earlier stage, prior to precipitation. Engaging in seeding activities during a severe thunderstorm scenario would prove futile.”
It’s just another tool in the toolbox for water supply,
Our specialized aircrafts only use natural salts, and no harmful chemicals,
In the 50s and 60s, people still thought about using cloud seeding to produce these big weather events, or change these big weather events. This [has] long been recognised as just not a realistic possibility.”
I get the impression we were all quite shocked by just how bad it was,
One of the basic principles of cloud seeding is that you have to target clouds in its early stage before it rains, if you have a severe thunderstorm situation then it is too late to conduct any seeding operation.”
We take the safety of our people, pilots, and aircrafts very seriously,
Rainfall from thunderstorms, like the ones seen in UAE in recent days, sees a particular strong increase with warming. This is because convection, which is the strong updraft in thunderstorms, strengthens in a warmer world,
Cloud seeding can’t create clouds from nothing. It encourages water that is already in the sky to condense faster and drop water in certain places. So first, you need moisture. Without it, there’d be no clouds,
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,
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
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,
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,
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,