IIn a place as dry as the desert city of Dubai, whenever it rains, they get it.
United Arab Emirates officials will often even try to make it rain, as they did earlier this week when the National Meteorological Center sent planes to inject chemicals into clouds to produce downpours.
But this time they got much more than they wanted. Dubai faced torrential rains on Tuesday; floods closed large parts of the city, including schools and the major airport; At least 18 people died, including at least one person whose car was swept away, as well as a bus full of schoolchildren in neighboring Oman. .
The UAE government media office said this was the heaviest rainfall recorded in 75 years and said:an extraordinary event.” More than an average year’s worth of water was spilled into the country in one day.
Many people now point to “cloud seeding” operations performed before rainfall.
“Do you think the flood in Dubai might have something to do with this?” popular social media account Wide Awake Media asked on xAlongside a clip of a news report on the UAE’s weather modification program.
However, experts say that while cloud seeding may have increased the amount of rainfall, it is wrong to attribute it to such a devastating downpour.
“Cloud seeding is unlikely to cause a flood,” Roslyn Prinsley, director of disaster solutions at the Australian National University’s Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions Institute, told TIME, calling such claims “conspiracy theories.”
This isn’t the first time cloud seeding has been blamed for floods in Dubai and around the world. In February, social media users accused officials working on a cloud seeding pilot program in California of causing storms that hit the state despite the technology not being used before the storms in question. And in Australia in 2022, as the country was under record rainfall, social media users reposted an old news clip questioning whether there was a link between cloud formation and flooding, to which fact-checkers responded: there is not.
Here’s what to know about cloud seeding, how and whether it works, and what scientists say people should really be worried about.
How does cloud seeding work?
Cloud seeding basically works by artificially recreating the process by which rain and snow occur naturally: In normal clouds, microscopic droplets of water vapor are attracted by atmospheric aerosols such as dust, pollen or salt from the sea. When enough water droplets coalesce around these nuclei, they form ice crystals and fall.
Clouds are seeded, typically by specially equipped aircraft, but also by ground-based generators, by placing particles (usually silver iodide) in and around selected clouds that will 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 regularly used for a wide variety of purposes around the world, from the UAE to China to the United States. Often used by drought-plagued governments, cloud seeding has even been a part of some of the biggest events in history, from cleaning up urban pollution and ensuring blue skies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics to clearing radioactive clouds bound for Moscow. From the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl to disrupting the movement of US enemies during the war in Vietnam. (Changing weather conditions in war has since been banned by the UN)
The rain-scarce UAE has invested heavily in cloud seeding for decades; this includes granting permanent residence to experts and funding research programs to better determine the seedability of clouds.
But the science on how effective cloud seeding is is still inconclusive. In 2003, the US National Research Council concluded at the time that “there is still no convincing scientific evidence” for its effectiveness. But a groundbreaking study in 2020 found that cloud seeding works; But researchers are clear about its limitations.
UAE meteorological officials say cloud seeding operations can increase rainfall by 10-30%, while California officials’ estimates for their own program are 5-10%. The Desert Research Institute (DRI), a research group for the state of Nevada, says cloud seeding can increase seasonal precipitation by about 10%, while the World Meteorological Organization assessed in 2019 that the effects of cloud seeding range from zero to 20%. Success in producing rain also depends significantly on atmospheric conditions such as wind and cloud temperatures.
That’s why experts agree that cloud seeding has a bad reputation among the public. Its impact is often exaggerated, and although it increases rainfall, other natural and unnatural factors play a much larger role in causing floods.
Do you have any concerns about cloud seeding?
There are a number of myths about cloud seeding; for example, it causes cloud-like white streaks in the sky known as “chemtrails”. DRI says these are actually “jet wakes, the aviation equivalent of visible clouds of vaporous breath on a cold morning.” “They have no connection to cloud seeding activities.”
But there are other reasons to be skeptical about cloud seeding.
Critics argue that clouds seeding one area can deprive another of rain, as clouds will release precipitation earlier than they should. (Iran has been accusing its neighbors of “stealing its rain” for years.)
Others have raised health concerns about the chemicals used to seed the clouds. Silver iodide, a commonly used substance, can be toxic to animals, but others insist it is safe.
Laura Kuhl, a professor of public policy at Northeastern University, argues in a publication for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that cloud seeding could do “more harm than good” because of these uncertainties, and given its limited effectiveness, cloud seeding could do “more harm than good.” “techno-optimism” “can obscure deeper structural drivers of vulnerability, such as unsustainable water use and unequal distribution of water access.”
What is the fault of the floods?
The severity of Dubai’s recent flooding may be due largely to the fact that the perennially dry country has not developed effective drainage infrastructure to cope with heavy rainfall. However, experts state that the main cause of such extreme weather events is climate change, as warmer air can hold more water, leading to more precipitation and floods in some regions.
When it comes to dealing with global warming and increasingly destructive weather phenomena, Prinsley says people should be more concerned about human activities “seeding” the atmosphere with greenhouse gases rather than cloud seeding.
“Natural weather and climate processes, as well as climate change, are the cause of much of the extreme weather we see around the world. “Cloud seeding is used to get stubborn clouds to produce some rain,” he says. “Thunderstorms are much more likely to cause extreme flooding in Dubai, as is the case around the world, due to heavy rainfall triggered by climate change.”
Contact us at letters@time.com.