Drones Making Rain - Cloud Seeding and Weather Manipulation
Civilizations live and die by the weather, especially rain which brings life and cools deadly heat. This is probably why cultures around the world have historically practiced some form of ritual or religious belief aimed at manipulating the weather. Today, we continue to attempt to persuade the weather to move to our will, but our rituals have been replaced with machines and technology.
Dubai has been in the news recently after showing off what it purports to be results from its weather modification experiments. The videos show drivers going down a highway under heavy rain. Separately, a camera pans to show flooding in the typically arid environment. The Emirate has been investing publicly in cloud seeding technology for years now, but these results were achieved with a relatively new form of the technology.
Cloud seeding technology has been experimented with in one form or another since at least the late 1940s. Attempts have been made to create rain, extend rainy seasons, and even influence the path and strength of hurricanes and other severe weather events. Traditionally, this has been achieved with the release of particles into the air. Silver iodide is one such particle which is commonly released, and is thought to increase cloud density and rainfall as the silver iodide attracts freezing water vapor to bind together. In other methods, flares containing hydroscopic elements are burned to release other basic chemicals including sodium into the air, to achieve a similar effect.
The more recent version of this technology takes a different approach. Rather than dumping particles into the air, it works off of electricity alone. Drones are flown to the appropriate level and release charges of electricity which encourage similar clumping behaviors with the ambient moisture in the air. On its own, this practice has a number of advantages if it’s proven to be effective at scale. The drones are unmanned flights which are much cheaper and more efficient than manned flights currently employed by the UAE, and this also helps remove lingering questions about the dumping of materials into the environment to create clouds. However, researchers at the University of Reading state that the technologies could be deployed in tandem for greater effects.
There are a number of factors influencing the UAE’s need for water and its decisions to invest public resources so heavily in weather modification. At the time the rain events took place, the region had been recorded hitting temperatures in excess of 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or over 51 degrees Celsius. The groundwater table there has been a source of concern for years, as it continues to lessen due to the demands of agriculture and the citizens living within. The UAE has also invested considerably in plants for desalination which supplies much of its current water supply, as well as wastewater treatment and recycling.
It’s not just the volume of rain that matters, but the density of the droplets themselves. In the extreme desert heat, smaller water particles may evaporate entirely before they hit the ground, never refreshing the supply of groundwater. Technologies encouraging water clumping and cloud formation create rain drops which retain more mass and can more effectively sink into the ground. The actual effectiveness of these practices have been debated for some time among scientists, who have offered differing perspectives on whether such cloud seeding technologies actually appreciably increase the sustainable rainfall in a given area. But Dubai’s National Center of Meteorology has posted these clips and offered them as proof that investing in cloud seeding is paying off.
It should be stated that the Emirates are far from the only place in the world where cloud seeding is used. Cloud seeding is widely employed in many areas of the world including in the US, Mexico, China, Russia, and across many parts of Africa and Asia. The UAE invests heavily in these resources and pushes scientific partnerships to advance the technology, which is likely the reason that their efforts which have caught the news attention lately, but there’s otherwise nothing too unusual about their use of the practice.
As for the potential of this technology, an increasing need for resources plus indications of climate change causing continued warming and more frequent extreme heat events may lead to situations where even desperate measures are called for in an effort to secure water security. But the practice is not without its concerns and criticisms.
Naturally, when it comes to something as large as the weather, there’s fear of tampering with the natural order of things in a way that we might not fully understand. The law of unintended consequences can be a scary thing, and weather is linked to global climate in such a complex manner that messing with it could lead to a feedback loop which we may not anticipate or be able to control.
Additionally, some speculate on the possibility that cloud seeding could actually be “stealing” water from other areas, pulling humidity to the seeded area and leaving surrounding environments in an even worse drought. In a part of the world which looks to be facing increasing water scarcity, this could lead to a water conflict where one nation relieves its drought at the expense of another. Water conflicts are already a potential flash point in the region, with some claiming that droughts enhanced by climate change have already played a role in conflicts such as the Syrian Civil War.
A less-discussed concern of this technology comes in the form of symptomatic amelioration. This is a little more complicated to explain, but it basically means that the technology could be just enough for a society to eventually get used to the additional rainwater resources provided and treat this as a new limit to growth. Without treating the underlying problems that cause the symptoms, eventually this new limit could be reached and this time with no technology left in the back pocket to be able to buy them more time.
The potential for technological advancement is both exciting and scary, a situation which points to something we’ve learned time and time again; tools and technologies can rarely be judged as objectively good or bad. Their impact must be judged on how they’re used, and sometimes we get an opportunity to see these results play out in real time.
Let me know what you think about cloud seeding and weather manipulation technologies, whether in Dubai or elsewhere. Whether you agree with the opinions presented here or not, the conversation is always an opportunity to learn. As always, you’ll find references located in the description section so you can analyze them and draw your own conclusions. Until next time, it’s been a pleasure as always. Thank you.
