Reading University denies its 'cloud-seeding' technology caused Dubai's ... trends now
The University of Reading has denied its 'cloud-seeding' technology caused the devastating floods in the United Arab Emirates.
Earlier this week, Dubai travel authorities urged travellers to stay away from the airport after more than a year and a half's worth of rain battered the desert city in just one day.
Horrendous floods swamped the typically scorching UAE, forcing dozens of flights to be cancelled as travellers crammed into the concourse to shelter from the torrential downpour.
Ahmed Habib, a meteorologist at the UAE's National Centre for Meteorology (NCM), told Bloomberg several cloud-seeding sorties were flown in the days before the unprecedented rainfall hit.
However, Reading University has said that even if cloud seeding had been carried out in the days running up to the storm, it could not have caused such extreme flooding.
Professor Maarten Ambaum, a meteorologist at Reading, said operational seeding 'would not have been able to influence this particular weather system'
Cars were filled with water, forcing people to abandon their vehicles
Shocking videos shared on social media showed how cars were filled with water, forcing hundreds of motorists to abandon their vehicles and swim to safety. Some cars were completely submerged, with the top of their roofs barely breaking the water's surface
Meteorology experts at the University of Reading have been working with the UAE in the past few years on a project to electrically charge clouds and produce raindrops.
Cloud-seeding is a technique which sees aircraft fire salt flares into clouds to speed up condensation and induce rainfall - to provide its groundwater.
Flight-tracking data analysed by the Associated Press showed one aircraft affiliated with the UAE's cloud-seeding efforts flew around the country on Sunday.
However, Professor Maarten Ambaum, a meteorologist at Reading, who works closely with NCM, told the Telegraph: 'The UAE does have an operational cloud seeding programme to enhance the rainfall in this arid part of the world; however, there is no technology in existence that can create or even severely modify this kind of rainfall event.
'Any seeding operation has a fairly short-lived – a few hours at the very most, and small-scale effect.
'So even if they had had some operational seeding activities in the days before, then they would not have been able to influence this particular weather system.'
Giles Harrison, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Reading, also said: 'The UAE does do operational cloud seeding, but there is huge difference between what this can achieve – targeting individual, developing clouds with seeding material released from an aircraft – and the Dubai rainfall, which was associated with a large weather system advancing across the region.'
His colleague Professor Maarten Ambaum added: 'The UAE does have an operational cloud seeding programme to enhance the rainfall in this arid part of the world, however, there is no technology in existence that can create or even severely modify this kind of rainfall event.'
Since the early 1990s the UAE has been using this controversial technique to increase rainfall by around 15-25 per cent. Shown here is a UAE plane releasing salt flares within a cloud
Cloud seeding works by releasing grains of salt or silver iodide into clouds, these trigger water vapour to condense or freeze into droplets big enough to fall as rain
