Dubai airport was obliged to again delay flights due to heavy storms on May 2, less than two weeks after experiencing the heaviest rainfall on record.
Speculation is rife as to the possible causes of the storms.
A years-long weather experiment taking place in Dubai, ‘cloud seeding’, was initially blamed for the downpour. This stimulates rain by zapping clouds with water-attracting salt flares that make water vapour condense more easily. The droplets formed then turn into rain.
Cloud seeding was developed to increase rainfall in dry areas such as the UAE along with other countries such as the United States.
Scientists, however, have denied claims that cloud seeding caused the floods.
Diana Francis, Head of Environmental and Geophysical Sciences at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, told BBC that the rainfall had been caused by a large, slow-moving storm.
“When such intense and large-scale systems are forecast, cloud seeding, which is a costly process, is not performed because [there is] no need to seed such strong systems of regional scale.”
In addition, cloud seeding flights did not occur around April 14, when the storms broke.
Richard Washington, a Professor of Climate Science at the University of Oxford said the real cause of the storm was climate change.
“The interesting thing is that humans have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that 2 400 gigatonnes of carbon (our total emissions since pre-industrial times) might make a difference to the climate, but very readily get behind the idea of a few hygroscopic flares making 18 months’ worth of rain fall in a day,” Washington told The Conversation.
An assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming would increase the frequency and intensity of the storms in the Middle East region.
