How Cloud Seeding Mechanism | Can Make it Rain or Prevent Extreme Weather

Major Key Points:-

1. Cloud seeding is a technique to increase rain or snow by adding ice nuclei to clouds.
2. It works best in specific cloud types with enough moisture and under certain weather conditions.
3. The effectiveness of cloud seeding is debated, with some studies showing a minimal increase in precipitation.
4. Cloud seeding is used to manage extreme weather events like hailstorms by reducing hail size.
5. While Dubai used cloud seeding before heavy rainfall, experts believe it likely wouldn't have significantly impacted the amount of rain and flooding.
6. Climate change, with a warmer atmosphere holding more moisture, is more likely to cause heavy rainfall.

Backstory - What is a cloud seeding mechanism...?

Clouds are microscopic droplets of water or ice crystals formed when water vapour in the upper atmosphere condenses and cools around tiny particles of dirt or salt floating in the air. Raindrops and snowflakes cannot develop without these tiny particles, known as condensation or ice nuclei.

'Cloud seeding mechanism' is a climate change technique that enhances a cloud's potential to produce rain or snow by inserting microscopic ice nuclei into specific types of subfreezing clouds. These nuclei offer a foundation for snowflakes to form. Following cloud seeding, newly created snowflakes rapidly expand and descend from the clouds to the Earth's surface, boosting snowpack and streamflow.

It has been around since the 1940s. It has been used in numerous nations, including Canada. Despite this, scientists have only lately been able to demonstrate its effectiveness by discriminating between natural and manufactured rainfall or snowfall.

Here is a small reference to the previous article:-

Our last post described anomalies in Deep Beneath Africa."Dark Blob in Vision."

How Effective is Cloud Seeding...?

"The results of approximately 70 years of study into the efficacy of cloud seeding are mixed," stated environmental scientist William R. Cotton of the University of Colorado at Boulder in a 2022 The Conversation post. He commented that it takes the correct types of clouds with enough moisture and the right weather conditions, resulting in a relatively small increase in precipitation.

Recent research analyzed the snow from three cloud seeding episodes and also calculated that they produced enough water to fill 282 Olympic-sized swimming pools to fall across an area of 80 by 80 kilometres — an average of a tenth of a millimetre at each given location. "No matter the mixed proof, lots of people are counting on it to work," Cotton stated.

• The analysis illustrates how climate change affects extreme weather.
• Cloud seeders try to protect 'hailstorm alley' from thunderstorms by lowering hail size.

According to the National Centre of Meteorology in the United Arab Emirates, cloud seeding can increase rainfall from a given cloud by 25% under ideal circumstances, and the method "plays an essential part in the broader context of climate change mitigation and building resilience."

Could Cloud Seeding Have an Impact on the Dubai Floods...?

The Associated Press reported that the National Centre's Meteorologists for Meteorology flew six or seven cloud-seeding aircraft before the showers. Flight-tracking data obtained by AP revealed that one aeroplane associated with the UAE's cloud seeding efforts went through the country on Monday.

The National, an English-language, state-linked publication in Abu Dhabi, reported an anonymous centre official Wednesday: Said no cloud seeding occurred on Tuesday, without mentioning any previous flights. Several scholars from the Faculty of Science of Reading, some of whom collaborated with the UAE to develop electrical cloud seeding technology, published statements claiming that cloud seeding could not have substantially contributed to such severe weather.

"The United Arab Emirates has an operational cloud seeding program to enhance rainfall in this arid part of the world, but there is no technology in existence that can create or even seriously modify this type of rainfall event," wrote Maarten Ambaum, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading who researched rainfall patterns in the Gulf region. "In this specific scenario, there would have proved no advantage to seeding these clouds as they had been expected to produce significant rain anyway."

Other researchers' points of view:-

"It is highly doubtful that cloud seeding could trigger a flood," Roslyn Prinsley, head of catastrophe solutions at the Australian National University Centre for Climate, Energy, and Disaster Solutions, told TIME, dismissing such accusations as "conspiracy theories."

On the other hand, Prinsley and Ambaum identified climate change as a possible cause of excessive rainfall, citing that a warmer atmosphere can contain more water vapour. A 2022 analysis of severe weather around the world over the last two decades found that heavy rainfall is getting more common and intense as the temperature warms.