Year-round rainfall in UAE likely with cloud seeding

Dubai - The UAE is deliberately inducing rain and cloud seeding will definitely help boost ground water supply.

There is a chance that the UAE can experience a year-round bout of intermittent rain if cloud seeding missions hit the right types of clouds and induce precipitation at the right time, a top official has said. The country will continue its missions even during the summer months to try and induce rains.

Although cloud seeding, which the UAE adopted in the early 1990s, is not an exact science, the process of shooting salt flares into the clouds has increased the chance of rain in the country by 15-25 per cent.

"It can sometimes go to as high as 30 per cent," Khalid Mohamed Al Obeidli, head of cloud seeding at the National Centre of Meteorology, told Khaleej Times on Wednesday.
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Since January this year, the NCM has conducted 88 cloud seeding missions, including five flights on Tuesday, coinciding with the scattered downpours of varying degrees across the UAE on Wednesday morning. Heavy rain, thunder and lightning were reported in parts of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah, with forecasters saying rainy conditions will persist till Sunday.

The UAE is deliberately inducing rain and cloud seeding will "definitely help boost" the ground water supply of a desert country with an average annual rainfall of only about 100mm.

"More rainfall will help ease the water stress, and cloud seeding is cheaper (costs around 1 fil per cubic metre of water produced as compared to 60 fils needed to desalinate the same amount of water) and more environment-friendly than desalination," Al Obeidli said.

He added, however, that it is still hard to quantify how much rainfall is generated because of cloud seeding. "We cannot say that we are experiencing more rain this year than last year because more data and studies are needed to make this claim," Al Obeidli noted.

Weather conditions 'typical'

The official said that the sporadic rains that are expected to continue across the UAE until Sunday are "typical" during spring, when the country transitions from cool weather to hot summer. "We cannot control the rain and we cannot control the cloud because it is always moving, but we can study each cloud formation and see if it is suitable for cloud seeding," said Al Obeidli.

Al Obeidli added that the NCM also conducts cloud seeding during the summer months. "The types of clouds are different during winter but there are towering clouds over Al Ain, Ras Khaimah and Fujairah that we can use for cloud seeding," he said. "We track the clouds to make sure that we hit it at the right time and right place so rain will fall in the UAE."

angel@khaleejtimes.com