By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Apparently subjective opinions are now more important on Sky Weather:
A record amount of rainfall was said to have caused “absolute carnage” in Dubai on Tuesday – with schools closed, flights suspended and people working from home.
More than 14cm (5.6 inches) of rain soaked the United Arab Emirates (UAE) city on Tuesday – the heaviest rainfall there since records began in 1949, the state-run WAM news agency said.
As people in Dubai continue to face disruption due to the downpours, some have suggested the rain could have been caused by a practice carried out by humans known as “cloud seeding”.
Here we take a look at what the process involves and whether it was responsible for Dubai’s wet Tuesday.
What is cloud seeding?
The practice is a type of weather modification process whereby small planes fly through clouds burning salt flares which can increase precipitation to help make it rain.
The UAE, located in one of the hottest and driest regions on Earth, has been leading the effort to seed clouds and increase precipitation.
Following the downpour, several reports quoted meteorologists at the National Centre for Meteorology, the UAE’s meteorology agency, as saying they flew six or seven cloud seeding flights before the rain.
Flight-tracking data showed that one aircraft linked to the UAE’s cloud seeding efforts flew around the country on Sunday.
What have the experts said?
Sky News weather producer Chris England said he doubted cloud seeding contributed to the downpour, as the evidence of the practice working is “pretty slim at best”.
He added: “Some studies have indicated climate change will bring an increase in rainfall to the area.”
Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, also said it was misleading to talk about cloud seeding as the cause of the rainfall.
“Cloud seeding can’t create clouds from nothing. It encourages water that is already in the sky to condense faster
and drop water in certain places. So first, you need moisture,” she said.
“Without it, there’d be no clouds.”
https://news.sky.com/story/what-is-cloud-seeding-and-did-it-cause-record-rainfall-in-dubai-13117432
So Chris England, who I suspect knows no more about cloud seeding than you, me, or the village idiot, is sure climate change is to blame instead.
Meanwhile, 1st prize for stating the obvious goes to Otto, the expert in fabricating fictitious weather attribution claims. Nobody claims that seeding makes rain out of nowhere – the claim is that it increases rainfall where clouds already exist.
Of course, there are thousands of cities around the world, so it is inevitable that there are record claims like Dubai’s somewhere every year. They have absolutely no climatological significance whatsoever.
Interesting though, the World Bank Climate Portal has analysed the UAE’s daily rainfall records, and concluded that 140mm of rain in a day is not unusual from a statistical point of view – TRANSLATION – it’s just weather!
https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/united-arab-emirates/extremes
Final thought.
Heavy rain in the Middle East is part of life there. Has Sky never heard of wadis before?
But if rainfall is really increasing in these desert regions, then surely this is a good thing?
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Paul Homewood
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