Dubai/UAE Pounded By Unprecedented Rains; Prompts Cloud Seeding Questions

 The glittering dry, desert city of Dubai isn't so dry anymore.

In one day this week, Dubai had as much rain as it
normally has in about a year and a half. The desert 
location was socked by extreme downpours. 

A storm dumped about 5.6 inches of rain on Dubai in just 24 hours.  What makes that especially remarkable an entire year there normally features just 3.7 inches of rain.  

One report indicated about ten inches of rain, which would be more than double what usually falls over the course of two years. 

It's super rare for any spot to have a year's worth of rain in a day, never mind two years. 

The result was unsurprisingly chaos, as video showed planes splashing through floodwaters at Dubai International Airport and dozens of cars drowned in water beneath the city's gleaming skyscrapers. 

The flooding turned tragic in neighboring Oman, where 19 people have been killed amid heavy rain and flooding over the past few days. The deaths included 10 children and an adult swept away in a vehicle, the Associated Press reported. 

There's controversy in this, too, as the Associated Press reported:

"Several reports quoted meteorologists at the National Center for Meteorology as saying they flew six or seven cloud-seeding flights before the rains. Flight-tracking analyzed by The Associated Press showed one aircraft affiliated with the UAE's cloud-seeding efforts flew around the country Monday."

UAE has been conducting cloud seeding to enhance rainfall. Groundwater is dwindling in the region. However, the UAE has not commented on whether there was any cloud seeding going on as this storm loomed.

Cloud seeding - something that's been around for decades - involves injecting silver iodide into clouds that have plenty of water vapor. The silver iodide encourages ice crystal formation, which promotes additional rain and snow. 

Many experts question whether the cloud seeding - if it did happen - contributed much to the disaster. Research does indicate cloud seeding does increase precipitation under certain circumstances, but the added precipitation caused by the practice tends not to create a huge amount of excessive precipitation, as the Washington Post notes.

The weather pattern over Dubai was unusual, and that certainly was the major contributor to the downpours. 

A slow moving trough of low pressure moved into the region this week, drawing huge amounts of moisture toward the UAE, setting the stage for downpours. 

As meteorologist Jeff Berardelli explained on X (formerly Twitter), the storm also ingested a large amount of dust.  That dust can also be a cloud seeder, coalescing bits of moisture into a multitude of rain drops. 

We don't yet know whether climate change made this worse or had any influence at all. But in general, climate change does make storms more intense, and rainfall more torrential in many storms.   

As the Washington Post reports, Friederike Otto, a climate scientist with Imperial College London said ie makes sense that climate change could have made the Dubai/UAE storm worse than it otherwise might have been. 

She noted that climate change is producing heavier rainstorms worldwide because warmer air can hold more moisture. "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," Otto said