Dubai is a hot desert city which rarely sees rain.

The country receives only around 200mm of rain per year, as compared to Singapore's 3,000mm per year.

However, on Apr. 15, 2024, 142mm of rain pelted the city in a sudden downpour.

To put this into perspective, the amount of rain that would typically fall in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 18 months flooded Dubai within just 24 hours.

And the city was not prepared for the deluge. 

Apocalyptic images of cars submerged in water, people stuck in their houses, and even stray cats drowning in the floods spread across social media and the news.

The Dubai floods: "Climate change", cloud seeding or something else?pic.twitter.com/NDWfpT1fA5

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) April 17, 2024

At least four people died in the floods, reported ABC News. These include two women who suffocated inside their vehicle and a man who died when his vehicle fell into a sinkhole.

According to ABC News, UAE officials have yet to release information regarding the exact number of casualties caused by the storm.

Online discussion

The incident has prompted questions about the cause of the torrential downpour, with one of the prominent suspects circulating on social media being cloud seeding.

Take for instance this TikTok user, thetoddgross, who uploaded a video on Apr. 17 blaming cloud seeding for the floods. The video has, as of Apr. 22, netted over two million views:

@thetoddgross Did The UAE really seed the clouds and cause massive flooding in Dubai? #uae#dubai #dubai🇦🇪 #dubaiflooding #flood#weather#meteorology#cloudseeding ♬ original sound - toddgross

In the video, thetoddgross, a U.S. meteorologist, argues that the UAE had seeded "thunderstorm" clouds, and thereby "aggravated" an already intense downpour.

Similar claims circulated even on major news outlets.

This article by Bloomberg, for instance, initially stated on Apr. 16 that the heavy rains "stemmed partly from cloud seeding".

What is cloud seeding? 

Cloud seeding is a form of weather modification that causes clouds to produce additional rainfall.

Clouds are formed when water vapour, rising from our oceans, lakes and rivers, cools and condenses around tiny particles of dust or salt.

What cloud seeding projects try to do is to artificially send up additional particles into selected clouds in the sky. This “seeds” the cloud, enhancing its rainfall production.

For instance, one cloud seeding programme uses “ground-based generators” to send up a compound called silver iodide which is “not known to be harmful to humans or wildlife”.

The compound, touching subfreezing clouds, leads to the formation of snowflakes which then fall to the ground. The result is an increase in precipitation and snowfall.

The UAE frequently conducts cloud seeding, and instead of ground-based generators, uses planes that shoot flares containing a kilogram’s worth of salt material compounds into chosen clouds, in a programme that started back in the 1990s.

Cloud seeding has been done for decades to aid regions facing severe drought issues.

Was it to blame?

According to scientists, probably not.

Firstly, the UAE was not running cloud seeding operations during the torrential downpour.

A spokesperson for UAE's National Center of Meteorology (NCM) stated that “NCM didn't conduct any seeding operations during this event". 

Secondly, NCM claimed that it was “impossible to link cloud seeding operations with the rainstorm.” 

It is also unclear if cloud seeding programmes even produce significant amounts of additional rainfall in the first place.

A report published in 2003 by the National Research Council in the U.S., for instance, noted that results of cloud seeding experiments have “been inconclusive due to a lack of physical understanding and, in some cases, inconclusive statistical evaluations.”

The Bloomberg article that partially attributed cloud seeding as the cause was later corrected on Apr. 18 with a disclaimer stating that "meteorologists said it was unlikely that [cloud seeding] had a significant impact on the rainfall".

What caused the floods?

So what could be behind the torrential downpour in Dubai?

Esraa Alnaqbi, a senior forecaster at NCM, told Reuters that the rainfall resulted from an “abnormal” weather event.

Namely, a “pressure squeeze” was exerted by a low pressure system in the upper atmosphere and low pressure at the surface, precipitating the deluge.

This squeeze was also intensified by the contrast between warmer temperatures at ground level and colder temperatures higher up, creating the conditions for the powerful thunderstorm.

Climate change a likelier possibility

Scientists also state that global warming, a consequence of human-caused climate change, and rising temperatures, might have played a key role in causing the Dubai floods.

Firstly, a warmer atmosphere can carry more moisture. According to NASA, water vapour does not condense and precipitate out of the atmosphere as easily at higher temperatures.

Secondly, according to an expert who spoke to Reuters, global warming has also warmed up the waters in the seas around Dubai.

This means more evaporation, and thus more water vapour being released into the air.

This combination of a more water-retentive atmosphere and higher evaporation rates can lead to bigger sudden rainfall events.

Imagine a fresh, dry, hot towel soaking up a bucket-load of water. When something like a “pressure squeeze” wrings this towel, a huge amount of water can be dumped, all at once.

The pressure squeeze, combined with a moisture-heavy atmosphere, could have led to the deluge in Dubai.

Global warming therefore could have played a significant role in exacerbating the consequences of an already abnormal weather event.

The effects of El Niño

An article by Bloomberg pointed out that "more detailed studies are needed" to conclusively say that global warming was the leading cause of the floods.

The article also noted that El Niño might have played a more significant role than global warming.

According to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), El Niño takes place every two to seven years, and is "associated with warming of the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean". 

WMO also notes that El Niño has the "greatest impact on the global climate in the second year of its development". Since the current El Niño began in 2023, it is likely to peak in 2024.

All the same, WMO insists that El Niño's effects on global temperatures must be seen in the context of "a climate being changed by human activities".

Namely, WMO notes that global weather patterns cannot be explained away by El Niño alone, emphasising the significance of global warming instead.

Climate adaptive infrastructure

This incident has since highlighted the need for better infrastructure in Dubai that can cope with heavy flooding.

Bloomberg pointed out that storm drains are not widely included in city planning because it rarely rains in the desert city. Instead, Dubai relies on "pumping trucks" to suck up excess water with hoses.

While normally good enough, this "stopgap" measure showed its limitations during the floods.

As noted by Bloomberg, deciding whether to spend on climate adaptive infrastructure is tough. On the one hand, such infrastructure can help a city cope with disastrous, one-off events like the Dubai floods.

On the other hand, given how erratic and exceptional these events are, it can be hard to justify the enormous expenses required for adaptive infrastructure.

All the same, a climatologist who spoke to Reuters noted that extreme rainfall in places like the UAE and Oman is likely to get worse with climate change. 

Since the higher temperatures resulting from global warming lead to more moisture staying in the air, heavy rainfall events are likely to hit “harder” than usual.

Given the rising global temperature trend, investment in climate adaptive infrastructure might pay off in the long run.

Top photo from BBlues100/X & IndianTechGuide/X