Playing God With the Atmosphere
Torrential rains across the United Arab Emirates prompted flight cancellations, forced schools to shut and brought traffic to a standstill.
The floods came after one of the worst storms in decades. The government had seeded clouds in the preceding days, though meteorologists said it was unlikely that had a significant impact on the rainfall. The UAE has been carrying out seeding operations since 2002 to address water security issues, even though the lack of drainage in many areas can trigger flooding.
The Gulf state’s National Center of Meteorology dispatched seeding planes from Al Ain airport on Monday and Tuesday to take advantage of convective cloud formations, Ahmed Habib, a specialist meteorologist, said Tuesday. The NCM on Wednesday said the seeding had taken place on Sunday and Monday, and not on Tuesday. Cloud seeding involves implanting chemicals and tiny particles — often natural salts such as potassium chloride — into the atmosphere to coax more rain from clouds.
Cloud Wars: Mideast Rivalries Rise Along a New Front
As climate change makes the region hotter and drier, the U.A.E. is leading the effort to squeeze more rain out of the clouds, and other countries are rushing to keep up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/28/world/middleeast/cloud-seeding-mideast-water-emirates.html
Iranian officials have worried for years that other nations have been depriving them of one of their vital water sources. But it was not an upstream dam that they were worrying about, or an aquifer being bled dry.
In 2018, amid a searing drought and rising temperatures, some senior officials concluded that someone was stealing their water from the clouds.
“Both Israel and another country are working to make Iranian clouds not rain,” Brig. Gen. Gholam Reza Jalali, a senior official in the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, said in a 2018 speech.
The unnamed country was the United Arab Emirates, which had begun an ambitious cloud-seeding program, injecting chemicals into clouds to try to force precipitation. Iran’s suspicions are not surprising, given its tense relations with most Persian Gulf nations, but the real purpose of these efforts is not to steal water, but simply to make it rain on parched lands.
As the Middle East and North Africa dry up, countries in the region have embarked on a race to develop the chemicals and techniques that they hope will enable them to squeeze rain drops out of clouds that would otherwise float fruitlessly overhead.
Morocco and Ethiopia have cloud-seeding programs, as does Iran. Saudi Arabia just started a large-scale program, and a half-dozen other Middle Eastern and North African countries are considering it.
Iran’s Next-Door Neighbor Accused Of Stealing Rain Clouds As Severe Drought Sweeps Through The Country.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sanammahoozi/2024/01/11/irans-next-door-neighbor-accused-of-stealing-rain-clouds-as-severe-drought-sweeps-through-the-country/
