Dubai has been hit by record floods, sparking misleading speculation about cloud seeding
Dubai has been hit by record floods over the past 24 hours, sparking misleading speculation about cloud seeding.
"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," explains Richard Allan, professor in climate science at the University of Reading.
People walk through flood water caused by heavy rains in Dubai.
Cloud seeding involves manipulating existing clouds to help produce more rain.
In the hours that followed the floods, some social media users users were quick to wrongly attribute the extreme weather solely to recent cloud seeding operations in the country.
Earlier reports by Bloomberg suggested cloud seeding planes were deployed on Sunday and Monday, but not on Tuesday, when the flooding occurred.
While the BBC has been unable to independently verify when cloud seeding took place, experts say that at best it would have had a minor effect on the storm and that focusing on cloud seeding is "Misleading".
"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", says Dr Otto.Cloud seeding is generally deployed when conditions of wind, moisture and dust are insufficient to lead to rain.
In the last week, forecasters had warned of a high flooding risk across the Gulf."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," says Prof Diana Francis, head of the Environmental and Geophysical Sciences at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi.
Cloud seeding missions in Emirati territory are run by the National Center of Meteorology, a government task force.