UAE Makes It Rain Artificially by Sending Drones Up in the Clouds

By 2050, summer temperatures in certain parts of the Middle East and North Africa are projected to reach up to 46ºC during warmer seasons and remain over 30ºC at nighttime, according to researchers from the Max Planck Institute. Additionally, the UAE has been observed to experience average rainfall of fewer than 10 centimeters a year.

This puts an immense strain on the country’s aquifers, which causes temperatures to rise and increase dependence on costly desalination plants for adequate amounts of water.

In order to combat this threat and come up with a viable solution, the UAE has been in collaboration with researchers from the University of Reading. One such proposal is to send unmanned drones into clouds to condense smaller water droplets into bigger ones, which will eventually cause rainfall.

The unmanned drones will discharge electricity to prompt this interaction, which is essentially cloud seeding. This method has been around since 1923, but it has primarily countries usually resort to it to alleviate air pollution and produce snow on mountaintops.

Carnegie Council senior fellow and executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative Janos Pasztor, however, warns of the dangers that might come from the UAE’s plan.

“Such weather modification does not ‘produce’ rain as such. Rather, it makes rain happen somewhere, which means that it will not happen somewhere else. This immediately means that ecosystems and people living somewhere else where it would have rained will no longer get this rain,” he explained.

Source: Hypebeast