Dubai Says Freak Rain Was Caused by Cloud-Seeding Drones

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — The United Arab Emirates has been trying hard to curb the dwindling of its precious underground water table. To this end, it invested $15 million in nine different rain-making projects in 2017. This investment seemed to pay off this past week when the desert country was blessed with very rare torrential rain. Here are the details:The Independent reports that the United Arab Emirates has been abuzz with excitement over very unusual torrential rain that fell in the desert country for a few days around Monday, July 19.On Twitter, the UAE's weather bureau hinted that much of this unseasonal downpour is due to its multi-million-dollar cloud seeding efforts. One of the ways in which the UAE seeds clouds, is by using electricity-inducing drones. The drones were developed by the UAE and researchers from the University of Reading in England. They get catapulted into the air and cruise through the sky, gathering weather data and giving a nudge to clouds in the form of an electrical charge. The idea is that the electrical charge helps clump water droplets and other particles together to make new and bigger clouds that actually have a chance to generate much-needed precipitation. This is important since the UAE typically receives only four inches, or 10 centimeters, of rain per year. The idea is to make the droplets inside the clouds big enough so that when they fall out of the cloud, they survive down to the surface.Some scientists think cloud seeding doesn't really work, while others think it works too well.They point at instances like China's heavy reliance on a weather-altering system. Experts have argued that this system could be weaponized to steal rain from neighboring countries like India. If it turns out that cloud seeding can indeed be used to steal rain from neighboring countries, we might even see wars for rain in the future.