Dubai, one of the richest and driest cities in the world, is flooding. Many have been quick to blame cloud seeding, a climate-engineering strategy the city uses to wrench every drop of moisture it can from its dry air.
Is cloud seeding really to blame? And regardless of if it is… what even is it?
What is Cloud Seeding?
Clouds form around nuclei, small particles that cool the area around them, causing water to condense and form the early wisps of clouds. These clouds then grow and take shape as more water condenses in the atmosphere, forming larger clouds. Eventually, clouds break, giving way to a deluge of rain.
It stands to reason then, that if there were more of these small particles in the atmosphere, more clouds would form and there would be more rain. Governments in dry areas, like state governments of the American Southwest and city, state, and national governments in the Middle East and South Asia have been quick to turn to cloud seeding as an opportunity to increase rainfall and bring more moisture down from the atmosphere. Specifically, governmental cloud seeding programs tend to use planes and cannons to seed clouds with dry ice and liquid iodine, creating more cloud nuclei and thus more and denser clouds (Borenstein and Peterson, 2024).
While the practice makes sense in theory, weather scientists disagree on whether or not it actually works (Al Hosari et al., 2021). In particular, the difficulty of proving anything weather related due to the complexity of cloud formation processes and shifting climatic patterns has made cloud seeding a difficult to test subject (Bruintjes, 1999).
Some studies, like this one by the United Arab Emirates’ National Center for Meteorology, argue in favor of cloud seeding, highlighting results that prove an average increase in annual rainfall by 23% over seeded areas (Al Hosari et al., 2021). The center reports that cloud seeding practices have increased storm volume by over 150%, area cover by just over 70% and lifetime by roughly 65% (Al Hosari et al., 2021). Surely such explosive results are significant?
And yet, many scientists still cast doubt. A study by the American Meteorological Association argues against cloud seeding, stating that the variation in “precipitation formation mechanisms” between locations and at a location given shifting climatic patterns weaken the scientific credibility of cloud seeding’s reported progress (Bruintjes, 1999). As AP News reports, “cloud seeding, although decades old… has been hard to prove [to do] very much” (Borenstein and Peterson, 2024).
Did Cloud Seeding Cause Dubai’s Floods?
The resounding consensus: no.
According to AP News, while many blame cloud seeding, it certainly is not the cause of Dubai’s recent floods. The record breaking storm was “forecast days in advance” and more or less expected by climate scientists (Borenstein and Peterson, 2024). Cloud seeding, while potentially effective, can not create water out of moisture-less air, and to state that cloud seeding could cause the deluge is “akin to [believing in] perpetual motion technology” (Borenstein and Peterson, 2024). At its best, cloud seeding can bring more water from the atmosphere down to the ground, but it cannot create moisture where there wasn’t any before. Regardless of whether cloud seeding works – the storm must’ve gotten moisture from somewhere.
Where did that moisture come from? Scientists blame climate change. As the climate warms, so does the atmosphere, and warmer air can hold more moisture (Borenstein and Peterson, 2024). The strangely large concentrations of moisture in an otherwise dry region are likely due to a warming global climate, one that allows for larger build-ups of moisture and stronger storms. These storms, termed “whopper storms” have been predicted (with statistical significance) to increase over the southeastern Arabian Peninsula, forewarning of more storms to come (Borenstein and Peterson, 2024).
At the end of the day, cloud seeding did not cause Dubai’s record-breaking storm. Climate change did.
Citations
Al Hosari, T., Al Mandous, A., Wehbe, Y., Shalaby, A., Al Shamsi, N., Al Naqbi, H., Al Yazeedi, O., Al Mazroui, A., & Farrah, S. (2021). The UAE Cloud Seeding Program: A statistical and physical evaluation. Atmosphere, 12(8), 1013. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12081013
Borenstein, S., & Peterson, B. (2024, April 18). Here’s why experts don’t think cloud seeding played a role in Dubai’s downpour. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/dubai-united-arab-emirates-oman-flooding-cloud-seeding-2f8c12854017e11ac7438579646b3758
Bruintjes, R. T. (1999). A Review of Cloud Seeding Experiments to Enhance Precipitation and Some New Prospects. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 80(5), 805–820. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1999)080<0805:AROCSE>2.0.CO;2
