Dubai and the United Arab Emirates are working tirelessly to dry out the heaviest rain ever recorded in the region, when a storm unleashed more than a year’s worth of rain in a single day, sparking widespread chaos across the desert nation.
Dubai, a city famed for its architectural marvels and bustling international airport, has experienced massive flooding this week, including 18 months of rainfall in just 24 hours, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
The downpours have left the city grappling with unprecedented flooding, with critical impacts on its infrastructure, including the shutdown of its pivotal international airport.
By the end of Tuesday, more than 5.59 inches of rain hammered Dubai, submerging streets, toppling structures and paralyzing the Middle East’s financial hub.
Additionally, 3.73 inches of rain managed to make its way into Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest airport for international travel. Typically, Dubai receives about 3.73 inches of rain annually.
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The closure of the airport left many in a precarious situation as it is a hub to the east.
Sad to see the state of #Dubai airport… one of the biggest connecting hub for world travel..
Personally been there 10+ times and 2 times in 2024. It’s submerged and depicts a river …#Dubai pic.twitter.com/fl2Fy99Hda
— Vineeth K (@DealsDhamaka) April 16, 2024
The flooding also has taken a terrible toll on city residents, with The Associated Press reporting at least 21 people had died.
In Ras al-Khaimah, the UAE’s northernmost emirate, police said one 70-year-old man died when his vehicle was swept away by floodwater, according to the Daily Mail.
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The extraordinary volume of rain has overwhelmed the region’s underprepared drainage systems and sparked debates over whether the storm was exacerbated by the country’s cloud-seeding efforts.
The UAE engages in cloud seeding as a strategy to supplement its scarce groundwater reserves, which are primarily replenished by energy-intensive desalination plants.
This technique, intended to boost the scant natural rainfall and supplement the limited groundwater replenished by energy-intensive desalination plants, involves aircraft releasing salt flares into clouds to induce precipitation.
The Daily Mail reported that meteorologists from the UAE’s National Centre for Meteorology said six or seven cloud-seeding flights were conducted prior to the rainfall.
The publication added that flight-tracking data, reviewed by the Associated Press, suggests that cloud-seeding sorties were conducted in the days leading up to the storm and confirmed that an aircraft associated with the UAE’s cloud-seeding operations was active over the country on Sunday.
However, it is unlikely that is the cause of the flooding, according to experts.
“It’s most certainly not cloud seeding,” meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the AP.
“If that occurred with cloud seeding, they’d have water all the time,” he said. “You can’t create rain out of thin air per se and get 6 inches of water. That’s akin to perpetual motion technology.”
Maue, who was appointed to NOAA by then-President Donald Trump in September 2020, said it was “maybe a little bit of a human conceit that, yeah, we can control the weather in like a ‘Star Trek’ sense.”
“Maybe on long time scales, climate time scales, we’re affecting the atmosphere on long time scales,” he said. “But when it comes to controlling individual rain storms, we are not anywhere close to that. And if we were capable of doing that, I think we would be capable of solving many more difficult problems than creating a rain shower over Dubai.”
He said the Middle East doesn’t get very many storms, but when they come, they can bring a deluge.
University of Reading meteorology professor Suzanne Gray told the AP that huge tropical storms “are not rare events for the Middle East.”
She pointed to a March 2016 storm that dropped 9.4 inches on Dubai in just a few hours.
Oman also experienced unprecedented rainfall and flooding this week that left at least 19 dead, according to the BBC.
