Team Blitz India
The United Arab Emirates averages less than 200 mm of rainfall a year, in stark contrast to London’s average of 1,051 mm and Singapore’s 3,012 mm. In the UAE, temperatures can reach as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122° Fahrenheit) during the summer, where 80 per cent of the country’s landscape is covered with desert terrain. With water scarcity at the core of the region’s challenges, UAE has implemented a programmV aimed at addressing this issue.
In the 1990s, the UAE introduced a rain enhancement methodology called cloud seeding. Cloud seeding is the process of increasing the amount of rain produced from the clouds above, which is designed to improve water shortage issues in arid regions around the emirate.
By the early 2000s, Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Vice President of the UAE, allocated up to $20 million for research into cloud seeding. The UAE partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and NASA to set up the methodology for the cloud seeding program.
The government introduced a task force called the National Centre of Meteorology (NCM) in Abu Dhabi where more than 1,000 hours of cloud seeding is performed each year to enhance rainfall. The NCM has a weather radar network and more than 60 weather stations where it manages seeding operations in the country and closely monitors atmospheric conditions.
Weather forecasters at the centre can observe precipitation patterns in clouds and identify suitable clouds to seed, with the aim of increasing the rate of rainfall.
Once they spot the right cloud, they instruct pilots to take to the air with their specialized aircraft loaded with hygroscopic flares on the plane’s wings.
Each flare contains about 1 kilogram of salt material components and can take up to three minutes to burn and shoot into the right clouds. After the seeding agent is introduced into the cloud, the droplets increase in size, surpassing the cloud’s capacity to sustain them against gravity, resulting in their release as raindrops.
