Have you ever gotten bored of the endless sunshine in Qatar? Maybe you’ve longed for a shower, just to add a little bit of variety to the weather. After all, a spot of rain might cool things down a little and help to clear some of the dust.
It might sound crazy to you, but this is exactly what they’re trying to do in the UAE: to manipulate the weather and make it rain. Sufian Farrah, a meteorologist at the National Center of Meteorology and Seismology in the UAE admitted in Arabian Business that in 2015 the UAE had spent over half a million dollars on a process known as cloud seeding. This year, they are on track to spend almost four times this amount.
Cloud seeding is a way of encouraging rain to form. There are a number of different methods which have been tried, but they all involve firing particles into the air. The types of particles varies because in colder parts of the globe, ice plays an important part in making rain. Across the Arabian Peninsula, however, rain usually falls when tiny particles of water in a cloud bump into each other. As the droplets collide, and combine, they become bigger and bigger until eventually they are too heavy to be suspended in the air and they fall towards the ground. To seed clouds in these warmer climes, a particle like sodium chloride (otherwise known as common old table salt) is used which attracts water and therefore encourages the droplets to grow.  
Firing particles into the air all sounds fairly straight forward, but in practice of course, things aren’t quite this simple. For a start, you can’t create something out of nothing, so if there is no moisture in the air to begin with, you can’t make it rain. Therefore in order to create rain, there needs to be a cloud already present. This year there have been far more clouds than usual, but this isn’t always the case across the Arabian Desert.
Another problem is that you have no control over the outcome of your weather meddling. All you can do is aim your rockets at the cloud, fire, then wait to see what nature has in store. If the conditions in the atmosphere are benign, your efforts would prove fruitless. However, if the conditions are more active, the particles may encourage growth. This could enhance the rain, or it could create a monster of a storm, which could result in flash flooding.
Given that there must be cloud already present in order to attempt cloud seeding, it is also very difficult to see if the process really works. There is no way to tell precisely how much rain the cloud would have given anyway, and therefore whether your injection of particles had any effect at all.
Despite its obvious difficulties, some countries still use the technique regularly. One of the leading champions of cloud seeding is China. The authorities regularly claim to use the practice, but whenever it triumphs its success, the forecast predicted rain anyway.
Most famously China claims to have used cloud seeding at the start of the Beijing Olympics in order to clear the skies. My weather charts suggested luck was more to play than cloud seeding on this occasion. A northwesterly wind picked up on the day in question, which always brings clear skies to the capital.
Another country which has been using the controversial technique recently is the USA. Given the country’s love of lawsuits, I found this fairly surprising. Imagine if a farm was situated downwind of the cloud seeding experiments and its crops were destroyed by floods; or perhaps another farm suffered a drought because the government didn’t seed the clouds. I could image lawyers having a field day over potential liability cases.
Despite any litigation issues, authorities in southern California have been cloudseeding in an attempt to alleviate the drought. The waters of the Pacific Ocean are currently warmer than usual, a phenomenon known as El Nino, and this often brings extra rain to the Golden State. Authorities have been trying to take advantage of this moisture and enhance these plentiful rains. Although this may have some effect this year, the El Nino conditions are weakening, and next winter the drought could well return. This would result in clear skies for days on end and make any cloud seeding attempts futile.
Back in the UAE, meteorologist Sufian Farrah was quoted as saying that producing water from cloud seeding was cheaper than producing it from desalination. This would be hard to prove, and the water produced is certainly less useful. After all, you have little control over where the water from cloud seeding experiments will fall, so it’s impossible to use the water to fill reservoirs or even a cup.
Fortunately in Qatar, we are out of the firing line of the cloud seeding experiments that are taking place in the UAE. The general flow of the weather in the region is down the Gulf from Qatar to the UAE, or from west to east. This means that any storms which may explode in the experiments wouldn’t affect our weather.


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