Is cloud seeding to blame for flooding? What to know

IIn a place as dry as the desert city of Dubai, whenever it can rain, they accept it.

UAE authorities often even try to make it rain – as they did earlier this week, when the National Center of Meteorology sent planes to inject chemicals into the clouds to try to bring about some rain.

But this time they got much more than they wanted. Dubai faced torrential rain on Tuesday, with flooding closing much of the city, including schools and its main airport.killing at least one man whose car was destroyed, as well as at least 18 others in neighboring Oman, including a bus full of schoolchildren.

The UAE government media office said it was the heaviest rainfall recorded in 75 years and called it “an exceptional event.” More than a normal year’s worth of water was dumped on the country in a single day.

Now, many people point the finger at the “cloud seeding” operations that precede precipitation.

“Do you think the flooding in Dubai might have something to do with it?” popular social media account Wide Awake Media asked on Xalongside a clip from a news report about the UAE’s climate modification program.

But experts say that while cloud seeding may have increased rainfall, attributing such devastating rain to them is a mistake.

“Cloud seeding is very unlikely to cause a flood,” Roslyn Prinsley, head of disaster solutions at the Australian National University Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, told TIME, describing such claims as “conspiracy theories.”

This is not the first time that cloud seeding has been blamed for flooding – in Dubai and across the world. In February, social media users accused authorities working on a pilot cloud seeding program in California for causing storms that hit the state, despite the technology not even being used before the storms in question. Is at Australia In 2022, as the country experienced record rainfall, social media users recirculated an old news clip that questioned whether there was a link between cloud seeding and flooding – to which fact-checkers responded: there is not.

Here’s what you should know about cloud seeding, how and if it works, and what scientists say people should really worry about.

How does cloud seeding work?

Cloud seeding basically it works artificially recreating the process by which rain and snow occur naturally: in normal clouds, microscopic droplets of water vapor are attracted to atmospheric aerosols such as dust, pollen or sea salt. When enough water droplets converge around these nuclei, they form ice crystals and fall.

Clouds are sown, typically by specially equipped aircraft, but also by ground-based generators, deploying particles, usually silver iodide, in and around selected clouds to act as nuclei and trigger the precipitation process.

Does cloud seeding work?

Since the futuristic weather modification technique was introduced in the 1940s, it has been used regularly across the world, from the United Arab Emirates to China to the United States, for a wide range of intended purposes. Mainly employed by governments battling drought, cloud seeding has been part of some of the biggest events in history, from cleaning up urban pollution and guarantee blue skies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to avoiding Radioactive clouds heading towards Moscow after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, to making it difficult the movement of US enemies during the Vietnam War. (Weather modification in warfare has since been banned by the UN)

For decades, the rain-scarce UAE has invested heavily in cloud seeding, including concession permanent residence for specialists, and financing research programs to better identify cloud seedability.

But the science on the effectiveness of cloud seeding remains inconclusive. In 2003, the US National Research Council concluded that “there is still no convincing scientific proof” of its effectiveness at the time. A 2020 landmark studyHowever, they found that cloud seeding works – but the researchers are clear about its limitations.

UAE meteorological authorities to say that its cloud seeding operations could increase rainfall by 10-30%, while California authorities estimates for your own program they are 5-10%. The Desert Research Institute (DRI), Nevada’s research group, says cloud seeding can increase seasonal precipitation by about 10%while the World Meteorological Organization evaluated in 2019 that the impacts of cloud seeding range from almost nothing to 20%. And success in producing rain significantly depends atmospheric conditions, such as wind and cloud temperatures.

This is why experts agree that cloud seeding tends to get a bad rap from the public. Its impact is often exaggerated, and although it can increase rainfall, other natural and non-natural factors play a much greater role in causing flooding.

Are there any concerns about cloud seeding?

Several myths are associated with cloud seeding, such as that it causes what are known as “chemtrails,” white cloud-like streaks across the sky. DRI says in fact, they are “jet contrails and are the aviation equivalent of visible plumes of steaming breath on a cold morning.” They “have no connection to cloud seeding activities.”

But there are other reasons for skepticism about cloud seeding.

Critics argue that cloud seeding in one region may simply deprive another of rain, since the clouds will trigger precipitation ahead of schedule. (Iran has for years accused their neighbors from “stealing the rain.”)

Others have expressed health concerns about the chemicals used to seed clouds. Silver iodide, a commonly used substance, can be toxic to animalsalthough others insist it is safe.

In a post for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Laura Kuhl, professor of public policy at Northeastern University, argues that cloud seeding can do “more harm than good” due to these uncertainties and because, given its limited effectiveness, it promotes a feeling of “techno-optimism” that “can obscure deeper structural factors of vulnerability, such as the use unsustainable water supply and the unequal distribution of access to water.”

What is to blame for the floods?

The severity of the recent floods in Dubai may be largely because the perennially dry country has not developed effective drainage infrastructure to deal with heavy rainfall. But experts note that one of the main reasons for such extreme weather events is climate change, as warmer air can hold more waterwhich leads to more intense rains and flooding in some areas.

Prinsley says that when it comes to dealing with global warming and increasingly destructive weather phenomena, people should be more concerned about human activities that “seed” the atmosphere with greenhouse gases than about seeding clouds. .

“Climate change, along with natural weather and climate processes, is the cause of much of the extreme weather we are seeing around the world. Cloud seeding is used to get recalcitrant clouds to produce some rain,” she says. “It is much more likely that the storms themselves caused the extreme flooding in Dubai due to intense rainfall caused by climate change – as is happening around the world.”