Dry ice

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• That was the story last week when more than a year’s worth of rain fell in a day on the Arabian Peninsula, one of the world’s driest regions.
• Desert cities like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) suffered floods that submerged motorways and airport runways.

• Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue.
• Richard Washington, a professor of climate science at the University of Oxford, has seen the inside of a storm.
• To confirm if cloud seeding really could breed record-breaking rain, he once boarded an aeroplane bound for a thundercloud over the South Africa-Mozambique border.

What caused the flood?

• But by flying a lot of missions, half with cloud seeding and half without, and measuring rainfall between the two, meteorologists eventually showed that cloud seeding did modify rain rates in some storms.
• That’s not what caused Dubai’s floods though.

• Their approach is to fire hygroscopic (water-attracting) salt flares from aircraft into warm cumuliform clouds,” Washington says.
• “So could seeding have built a huge storm system the size of France?
• Let’s be clear, that would be like a breeze stopping an intercity train going at full tilt.

The experiment of our lives

• Although last week’s deluge was unusual, the Arabian Peninsula does tend to receive more of its precipitation in heavy bursts than steady showers.
• What is likely to kill more people as temperatures rise in this part of the world is not water, but heat.
• At this threshold the air is so hot and humid that you cannot lower your temperature to a safe level by sweating.

• Peter Irvine, a lecturer in earth sciences at UCL, proposes dimming the sun by pumping microscopic particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some of its rays.
• These layers of gases that surround our planet have nurtured life by keeping temperatures stable and harmful radiation out.
• Read more:
  Time is running out on climate change, but geoengineering has dangers of its own

  As humanity contemplates another large-scale experiment in our atmosphere, there is another, even bigger one, waiting to be resolved.

• Thousands of meters below, a smaller plane would be threading through the storm downdrafts measuring the rain.
• The project I was part of, neatly named Rain (Rain Augmentation in Nelspruit), was a cloud seeding experiment several years in the making.
• Cloud seeding involves adding tiny particles into a cloud in order to give moisture something to attach to and form droplets.
• There is no identical cloud with which to compare the outcome of having seeded a particular cloud.

A perfect storm

• Parts of the Arabian Peninsula received 18 months of rainfall in 24 hours that Tuesday.
• Being the weather-man in the chat group, I looked at the satellite and the forecast model data.
• What I saw were the ingredients of a perfect storm.
• Under these conditions, thunderstorms develop very readily and in this case a special kind of storm, a mesoscale convective system, built and sustained itself for many hours.

Cloud seeding not to blame

• What surprised me, though, was not the majesty of nature, but an emerging set of reports blaming the ensuing rains on cloud seeding.
• It turns out the UAE has been running a cloud seeding project, UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science, for several years.
• The idea, similar to the Rain project I once worked on, is to promote the growth of cloud droplets and thereby rainfall.

Richard Washington receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council to study climate processes.

• It is designed to provide a holistic view of the client organization’s entire shipping and enables them to drive operational efficiencies.
• There are many key areas where clients can drive operational efficiency using Mercury’s Navigent℠ portal.
• Timing of Shipments – Users of the Navigent℠ portal can drive operational efficiency by recommending better approaches to timing shipments.
• Mercury’s Navigent℠ portal provides a holistic view of the client organization’s entire shipping, and enables them to drive operational efficiencies.