Scenes of flood-ravaged neighborhoods in one of many planet’s driest areas have shocked the world this week. Heavy rains within the United Arab Emirates and Oman submerged automobiles, clogged highways and killed at the least 21 individuals. Flights out of Dubai’s airport, a significant world hub, had been severely disrupted.
The downpours weren’t a freak occasion — forecasters anticipated the storms a number of days out and issued warnings. However they had been definitely uncommon. Right here’s what to know.
Heavy rain there’s uncommon, however not unheard-of.
On common, the Arabian Peninsula receives a scant few of inches of rain a yr, though scientists have found {that a} sizable chunk of that precipitation falls in rare however extreme bursts, not as periodic showers.
U.A.E. officers mentioned the 24-hour rain whole on Tuesday was the nation’s largest since records there began in 1949. However components of the nation had skilled an earlier spherical of thunderstorms simply final month.
Oman, with its shoreline on the Arabian Sea, can also be susceptible to tropical cyclones. Previous storms there have introduced torrential rain, highly effective winds and mudslides, inflicting in depth harm.
International warming is projected to accentuate downpours.
Stronger storms are a key consequence of human-caused world warming. Because the environment will get hotter, it could actually maintain extra moisture, which might finally make its approach all the way down to the earth as rain or snow.
However that doesn’t imply rainfall patterns are altering in exactly the identical approach throughout each nook of the globe.
Of their latest assessment of climate research, scientists convened by the United Nations discovered there wasn’t sufficient information to have agency conclusions about rainfall developments within the Arabian Peninsula and the way local weather change was affecting them. The researchers mentioned, nonetheless, that if world warming had been to be allowed to proceed worsening within the coming many years, excessive downpours within the area would fairly probably change into extra intense and extra frequent.
The position of cloud seeding isn’t clear.
The U.A.E. has for many years labored to extend rainfall and enhance water provides by seeding clouds. Primarily, this includes taking pictures particles into clouds to encourage the moisture to collect into bigger, heavier droplets, ones which can be extra prone to fall as rain or snow.
Cloud seeding and different rain-enhancement strategies have been tried internationally, together with in Australia, China, India, Israel, South Africa and the USA. Research have discovered that these operations can, at greatest, have an effect on precipitation modestly — sufficient to show a downpour into a much bigger downpour, however in all probability not a drizzle right into a deluge.
Nonetheless, consultants mentioned pinning down how a lot seeding might need contributed to this week’s storms would require detailed examine.
“Normally, it’s fairly a problem to evaluate the impression of seeding,” mentioned Luca Delle Monache, a local weather scientist on the Scripps Establishment of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Dr. Delle Monache has been main efforts to use artificial intelligence to enhance the U.A.E.’s rain-enhancement program.
An official with the U.A.E.’s Nationwide Middle of Meteorology, Omar Al Yazeedi, instructed news outlets this week that the company didn’t conduct any seeding throughout the newest storms. His statements didn’t clarify, nonetheless, whether or not that was additionally true within the hours or days earlier than.
Mr. Al Yazeedi didn’t reply to emailed questions from The New York Instances on Thursday, and Adel Kamal, a spokesman for the middle, didn’t instantly have additional remark.
Cities in dry locations simply aren’t designed for floods.
Wherever it occurs, flooding isn’t only a matter of how a lot rain comes down. It’s additionally about what occurs to all that water as soon as it’s on the bottom — most critically, within the locations individuals dwell.
Cities in arid areas typically aren’t designed to empty very successfully. In these areas, paved surfaces block rain from seeping into the earth under, forcing it into drainage programs that may simply change into overwhelmed.
One recent study of Sharjah, the capital of the third-largest emirate within the U.A.E., discovered that the town’s fast development over the previous half century had made it susceptible to flooding at far decrease ranges of rain than earlier than.
Omnia Al Desoukie contributed reporting.
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