Dubai government responds to claims cloud seeding caused historic flooding

Dubai has been hit with a historic amount of rainfall this week, which some are blaming are a result of the United Arab Emirates' use of weather modification techniques.

Cloud generation is a real thing, and the United Arab Emirates has been leading the charge on technology for decades. The nation has been conducting experiments with the intention of assisting the generation of clouds in the region that lead to rainfall. The process works by cloud seeding planes releasing crystalline chemicals into already present clouds to increase rainfall, but now that technology has been thrown into question as Dubai has received an unprecedented amount of rainfall, the most in the region in the last 75 years.

Some areas received as much as 10 inches of rainfall within 24 hours, resulting in the unequipped region to suffer under intense flooding. Notably, neighboring country Oman has reported as many as 18 deaths as a result of the rainfall, with some of those deaths being schoolchildren.

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Some meteorologists have warned the intense rainfall is a result of the cloud seeding efforts by the UAE government, but the UAE's state-owned newspaper, The National, featured a representative from the country's National Centre of Meteorology, the body behind the cloud seeding, and said storm approaching over the Persian Gulf wasn't seeded.

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"One of the basic principles of cloud seeding is that you have to target clouds in its early stage before it rains," the agency's statement read. "If you have a severe thunderstorm situation then it is too late to conduct any seeding operation."

Bloomberg reported that weather modification planes weren't sent out on Tuesday, the day the storm began, but had gone out on Monday. Further reports from Wired state that Dubai is unfortunately very ill-equipped to deal with rainfall, with the city lacking critical infrastructure such as storm drains, while also mentioning any city would struggle to deal with a year's worthy of rainfall in just 24 hours.