It’s a bit like Alien vs. Predator or Godzilla vs. King Kong. Pass the popcorn: this is going to be fun.
It rained very heavily in UAE and Oman. A severe thunderstorm rolled in off the Gulf and allegedly dumped ‘record’ amounts of rainfall in Dubai and elsewhere over a period of less than 24 hours. Two competing teams have immediately sprung into action in an attempt to attribute the extreme rainfall and flooding to human activities: on the left, the climate crisis cultists and on the right, the geoengineering/weather modification crowd. Then there’s me in the middle, about to make the claim here that this is all just natural weather again.
Friederike Otto, extreme weather attribution Superwoman, has put on her X-ray specs and can immediately see right through this extreme weather event in order to declare in Le Monde that "it is highly likely that the deadly and destructive rain in Oman and Dubai was made heavier by human-caused climate change."
But the folks on X are having none of it:
“Leave God’s sky alone!” shouts one side. “Stop burning fossil fuels!” shouts the other. I don’t hear many people advocating for God’s role in this thunderstorm though. Time was when every extreme weather event was an ‘Act of God.’ Not anymore; the Divine Creator has been relegated to the side lines. When it comes to weather and climate, humanity rules, OK. Actually, no, it’s not OK. And rather than just make bare-faced assertions without providing evidence, I’m going to take the time and trouble to explain why it’s not OK.
So let’s start with the cloud-seeding claim. The UAE definitely runs cloud-seeding operations. That’s a fact. Did they seed clouds prior to this storm or during this storm? No, they didn’t. Despite reports in the media that cloud seeding was taking place and probably caused the torrential rain and flooding, or at least made it much worse, CNBC reports the following:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The National Center of Meteorology, a government taskforce responsible for cloud seeding missions in the United Arab Emirates, denied reports that it carried out the weather modification technique in the run-up to heavy storms across the country, therefore exacerbating flooding in places like Dubai.
The organization told CNBC that it did not dispatch pilots for seeding operations before or during the storm that struck the UAE on Tuesday.
Omar AlYazeedi, deputy director general of the NCM, said the agency “did not conduct any seeding operations during this event.”
He added, “One of the basic principles of cloud seeding is that you have to target clouds in its early stage before it rains, if you have a severe thunderstorm situation then it is too late to conduct any seeding operation.”
Unless the NCM and its deputy director general are lying in order to avoid getting the blame for the huge cost of the clear up operation, this is fairly definitive: cloud seeding operations did not happen prior to or during this event. For the doubtful though, Wired puts some flesh on the bare bones of this story:
News reports and social media posts were quick to point the blame at cloud seeding. The UAE has a long-running program for trying to squeeze more rain out of the clouds that pass over the normally arid region—it has a team of pilots who spray salt particles into passing storms to encourage more water to form. The floods were positioned as a cautionary tale by some: Here’s what happens when you mess with nature. Even Bloomberg reported that cloud seeding had worsened the flooding.
The truth is more complicated. I’ve spent the past few months reporting on cloud seeding in the UAE for an upcoming WIRED feature, and while it’s true that the UAE has been running cloud seeding missions this week—it performs more than 300 a year—it’s a stretch to say that it was responsible for the floods. (In fact, as we were preparing this story for publication on Wednesday morning, the UAE’s National Center for Meteorology told CNBC it had not seeded any clouds before the storm struck on Tuesday.)
There are a few reasons for this. First: Even the most optimistic assessments of cloud seeding say that it can increase rainfall by a maximum of 25 percent annually. In other words, it would have rained anyway, and if cloud seeding did have an impact, it would have been to only slightly increase the amount of precipitation that fell. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of cloud seeding in warm climates, and even if it does work, cloud seeding can’t produce rain out of thin air, it can only enhance what’s already in the sky.
Secondly, seeding operations tend to take place in the east of the country, far from more populated areas like Dubai. This is largely because of restrictions on air traffic, and means it was unlikely that any seeding particles were still active by the time the storms reached Dubai. Most of the scientists I’ve spoken to say the impact of cloud seeding has a very small, localized effect and is unlikely to cause flooding in other areas. But perhaps the best evidence that cloud seeding wasn’t involved in these floods is the fact that it rained all over the region. Oman didn’t do any cloud seeding, but it was even more badly affected by flooding, with a number of casualties.
To labour a pun, I think that pours quite a lot of cold water on the cloud-seeding theory, don’t you?
So then there’s dreaded climate change to deal with. It’s always difficult to counter the extreme weather claims of the climate fanboys (and girls) because essentially, their theory that a warmer atmosphere and warmer sea surfaces (due to humans of course) result in more water vapour in the atmosphere and hence more intense downpours is technically correct according to the simple Clausius-Clapeyron relation, but demonstrating specifically that global warming significantly intensified any given thunderstorm is not possible. However, falsifying the claim that it did is equally very difficult.
But there are a few holes in the ‘climate change dunnit’ narrative which should be pointed out. Firstly, the claim that the rainfall was ‘unprecedented’ and a ‘record’. Rainfall records may have been broken at certain weather stations but the data only goes back to 1949. Emirates 24/7 is a little more circumspect in its reporting of the event compared to the western media. It says:
The National Center of Meteorology confirmed that the record-breaking rainfall amounts that fell on the country during the past 24 hours until 9:00 PM on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, constitute an exceptional event in the climatic history of the UAE since the beginning of climate data recording. It is expected that the coming hours will witness even greater rainfall amounts.
The center mentioned that so far, the highest amount of rainfall has been recorded in the Khatm Al Shaklah area in Al Ain, reaching 254.8 mm in less than 24 hours. Additionally, the National Center of Meteorology stations in the country recorded heavy rainfall amounts in several areas.
It is noteworthy that the Al Shawamekh station recorded 287.6 mm on March 9, 2016.Such heavy rainfall represents an exceptional event contributing to an increase in the annual average rainfall in the United Arab Emirates, as well as enhancing the groundwater reserves in the country overall.
‘Exceptional’ is not the same as ‘unprecedented’ and in fact even more rain fell on the Al Shawamekh weather station in March 2016. By ‘coincidence’, March 2016 was the peak of the 2015/16 super El Nino and it is accepted that El Ninos do influence the pattern of weather in the Arabian Peninsula. A strong El Nino peaked in Feb/Mar this year, so that may have had an impact on the rains - plus a not-to-be-mentioned volcano might also have played some unspecified role too!
An interesting paper published in 2012 looked at rainfall trends in the Arabian Peninsula from 1978-2009:
Recent climate change in the Arabian Peninsula: annual rainfall and temperature analysis of Saudi Arabia for 1978–2009
It’s about annual rainfall, not daily rainfall, but given that it rains so very little in the Gulf states overall, just one heavy rain storm can contribute very significantly to the annual total.
Here is what the authors found re. annual rainfall:
From the late 1990s to 2009, the Arabian Peninsula actually got drier, not wetter.
Here’s another very interesting graphic from that paper:
The Oman/UAE region got drier in the decade 1980-89, wetter during 1990-99, and then drier again during 2000-2009. How does climate change do that then? I suggest it doesn’t. I suggest natural variability plays a much greater role in annual rainfall over UAE and Oman than does alleged man-made climate change. I suggest the exceptional rainfall over UAE and Oman was a natural weather event and that the flooding in Dubai could have been a lot less severe if the city planners had done their job better!
I can offer my own personal experience of being in the UAE in February 1982 or 1983. I attended a week long conference in Dubai, which ended with a number of us heading by bus over to Khor Fakkan on the Fujairah coast - about 80 miles away - supposedly for some R&R and paragliding, surfing etc. The rain started more or less as we left Dubai, but it became really heavy after we struck out across the desert from Sharjah, slowing the journey. You could occasionally making out a wellhead flare through the sheets of rain. We got to Khor Fakkan for a late lunch in the top floor restaurant of the Holiday Inn: I have photos of the globe light fittings half filled with water like goldfish bowls because the roof leaked. After lunch the esplanade was completely submerged, and cars found it impassible. It was decided that those with flights to catch needed to get back if at all possible, and we set off in our trusty Bedford bus. Passing through the mountains we came to a bridge over a wadi - at least, it had been a bridge in the morning, but now was submerged by the torrent. The bus driver was dubious, but a large bulk load truck made it across, so he followed and we got through. The road across the desert was by now frequently under several inches of water, and the going was very slow: we made Sharjah by about 10p.m. to find that all the underpasses were completely flooded and most roads had turned into canals. The driver stopped for a comfort break at the edge of the massive deserted Souk car park, which had become a lake, reflecting the lights of the Souk like a surreal scene from the Arabian Nights.
Old Gulf hands said they hadn't seen anything like it for at least 30 years. Dubai itself was not as badly affected, but was still very wet: I had difficulty securing a taxi to take me to DXB for my flight to Paris (a 747 refuelling in the middle of the night from Singapore) which was probably the worst flight at the front of an aircraft I have ever had, with the nose constantly buffeted from side to side by the turbulence which stretched until we got to the Med.
The event was certainly extremely similar to the recent one, including the extent of the storm, even if it was less severe in Dubai itself. Such storms appear to occur once every few decades, and are not novel.
Jaime
I worked in Dubai for 18 years as a civil and structural engineer and Dubai suffers from two problems regarding drainage, namely:
a. A large part of Dubai is at or below sea level, which makes it difficult to drain. Furthermore, pumped drainage can be overwhelmed by heavy rainfall.
b. Non-pumped drainage tends to get filled up with silty sand because most of the time the weather is dry. However, when it does rain the silt expands on contact with water and it then tends to block the drains, thus rendering them to be nearly useless. The only drains that can usually function properly are those in item (a) above that are below the water table in tunnels, etc., because these drains are working 24/7.
I suggest that (for the above reasons) the drainage system did not work properly and consequently could not cope with the large amount of rainfall from what is a rare, but not unusual, weather event.