Dubai faces a significant challenge in meeting the needs of its expanding population, particularly due to its desert environment. The city is placing great emphasis on increasing its water resources.
To address this concern, Dubai relies heavily on cutting-edge technology, using tactics such as manipulating weather conditions to enhance rainfall through cloud seeding.
The population of Dubai has increased from less than one million in 2002 to more than 3.5 million in 2022. With the city's population increasing exponentially, providing sufficient resources to all its inhabitants is a major challenge. Although the city has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent decades, it still struggles with the typical desert climatic conditions, i.e. hot and arid. However, technological advances have allowed Dubai to control the same weather! With the power of cloud seeding, they can now spawn storms at will to increase water sources. We understand how countries like the United Arab Emirates are learning to manipulate the weather by first understanding the concept of cloud seeding.
Cloud seeding is the practice of adding chemical compounds to clouds to generate rain. Silver iodide particles dispersed by aircraft or drones act as condensation nuclei or ice nuclei and induce rain. Vincent J. Schaefer, an American chemist and meteorologist, conducted the first cloud seeding experiment in 1946.
The chemical particles are spread out in supercooled clouds that are below the freezing point of water. These chemical particles act as nuclei, a surface around which water droplets can form. As more water droplets condense around this surface, they begin to form ice crystals. These tiny crystals begin to grow rapidly as the surrounding water vapor sticks to the crystals, producing snowflakes. After gaining a certain weight, the snowflakes fall as rain from clouds that would otherwise produce no rain.
Cloud seeding isn't exactly cutting-edge technology; it has been around since the 1940s and was in extensive use during the 1990s. It is intriguing to witness how a highly developed city like Dubai is leveraging this ancient technology to address its water challenges.
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