What’s behind heavy rainfall in Dubai

• The United Arab Emirates (UAE) recorded the heaviest rain ever after a severe thunderstorm hit the country recently.
• According to the state-run WAM news agency, the rain was “a historic weather event” that surpassed “anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949” - that was before the UAE was established in 1971.

Key highlights

• Heavy rains are unusual in the UAE, which is an arid, Arabian Peninsula country. However, they occasionally occur in the region during cooler winter months.
• Rain is uncommon, although it can happen during the cooler winter.
• A storm system moving across the region is the main culprit.
• There's also a chance cloud seeding, a technique to make rain clouds release more water, might have played a role.

Could climate change be involved?

• Rising temperatures worldwide can make the atmosphere hold more moisture, leading to more intense storms.
• But it's tough to directly link any single weather event to climate change because other things like El Niño and La Niña also affect weather patterns.
• While the average global temperature on the Earth has increased by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since 1850, the UAE has witnessed an increase of almost 1.5 degree Celsius in the past 60 years.
• The increase in temperatures is mainly caused by the rise of heat-trapping greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

IPCC Report

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Sixth Assessment Report released in 2021
  • Said human-caused rise in greenhouse gases has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
• Given the population growth and urbanisation in many parts of Gulf is also one of factor behind change in climate pattern.

CLOUD SEEDING

• Clouds need tiny water or ice droplets called nuclei to make rain.
• The weather modification method uses planes and ground-based cannons to shoot particles into clouds making more nucleai
  • Attracting moisture that falls as snow and rain.
• Usually silver iodide is used, but it can also be dry ice and other materials.
• The method, first pioneered in the 1940s, became popular in the U.S. West starting in the 1960s, mostly for snow.
• It can't create water from a clear sky - particles must be shot into a storm cloud that already holds moisture to get it to fall, or to fall more than it otherwise would naturally.