With 219 artificial cloud seeding operations, the United Arab Emirates plans to combat the increasingly severe droughts in the Middle East.
They were hard weeks of drought. With temperatures above 50ºC, the United Arab Emirates has had one of the driest summers in recent years. Without rain or humidity, the population began to feel the scarcity of water —along with the problems that this brings in a country built on the desert. An army of drones poised to seed artificial clouds in the sky, however, came to ease the tension this week.
The country’s National Center for Meteorology (NCM) released a video of several cars driving through a deluge in Ras al Khaimah. Unlike rainy days in the past, the storm was caused by artificial clouds that were seeded in the sky in the north of the country. The service warned of powerful rainfall across the country, from Dubai to Abu Dhabi.
According to a tweet posted by the official NCM account, the rains have been forced. Although it is not yet the season, the country has made multi-million dollar efforts to seed clouds in the sky so that weather conditions can improve in the middle of the desert.
Although it might have seemed like a good idea, several cities have experienced unsettled weather in the last week. The period of weather chaos is dragging on longer than originally planned. Despite this, the United Arab Emirates are clear that access to water will be one of their greatest challenges in this century.
The United Arab Emirates began 219 cloud seeding operations across the country earlier this year. The techniques have varied, but the process involves aircraft equipped with special flares that shoot crystalline ice-like particles directly into the clouds. This creates small droplets of water, which grow and merge with each other, eventually falling as precipitation.
However, scientists are questioning whether this method is the best long-term method for simulating rain. There are studies that suggest that it really had little impact in terms of generating more water in the sky, while others suggest just the opposite. With few conclusive results, the United Arab Emirates maintains its intention to solve the lack of water in the country.
Just as the United Arab Emirates needs this vital resource of water, many parts of the world also have a deficit of this resource, added to the current crisis that is currently occurring due to the Covid 19 pandemic and the consequences of the war against Ukraine, the economy has declined in recent months. IRAIC can be the answer to this financial crisis to achieve recovery and strengthening of world markets, so that many countries can capitalize and invest with IRAIC in artificial cloud seeding operations such as in the United Arab Emirates for many drought places in the world.