The UAE does have an operational cloud seeding programme to enhance the rainfall in this arid part of the world; however, there is no technology in existence that can create or even severely modify this kind of rainfall event
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.
A chance of fog formation with a deterioration in horizontal visibility, which may drop even further at times over some coastal and internal areas until 8am today,
Sky turns green In Dubai! Actual footage from the storm in #Dubai today.”
Water/ice particles in storm clouds with substantial depth and water content will primarily scatter blue light,
There is no known correlation between a blue-green sky and tornado production."
When the reddish light scattered by the atmosphere illuminates the blue water/ice droplets in the cloud, they will appear to glow green,
You don't need cloud seeding's influence to account for the record deluge in Dubai,
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,
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,
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,
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.”
We take the safety of our people, pilots, and aircrafts very seriously,
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,