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Some years ago, I found myself making my way up the narrow stairs of a Learjet on a sultry runway in a deserted airport near the South Africa-Mozambique border. The humidity was there to taste \u2013 the air thick with it.<\/p>\n
The weather radar was showing a fast-developing thundercloud. Our mission was to fly through the most active part of the storm, measure it, fly through again while dumping a bin load of dry ice, turn hard and fly through for a final measurement.<\/p>\n
The inside of the Learjet resembled a food blender, so severe was the turbulence. Thousands of meters below, a smaller plane would be threading through the storm downdrafts measuring the rain. It isn\u2019t something you do every day although the saucer-sized hail dents on the wings of the Learjet told of its many prior engagements.<\/p>\n
Apart from the fun of flying through the core of a thunderstorm in a Learjet, I didn\u2019t think much about the time I was lucky enough to be part of that project. Until I heard about the recent freak storm in Dubai.<\/p>\n
The project I was part of, neatly named Rain (Rain Augmentation in Nelspruit), was a cloud seeding experiment several years in the making.\u00a0Cloud seeding<\/a>\u00a0involves adding tiny particles into a cloud in order to give moisture something to attach to and form droplets. Gradually those droplets merge and become heavy enough to fall as rain. In theory, the \u201cseeeded\u201d clouds will grow more droplets suitable for rain.<\/p>\n No one flight is proof of seeding having been effective. It can\u2019t be. There is no identical cloud with which to compare the outcome of having seeded a particular cloud. It is therefore necessary to fly a lot of missions and to measure, but not seed, half of them thereby creating a data set for the experiment itself (seeded clouds) and the control (unseeded clouds).<\/p>\n Statistical analysis of the results from Rain was rigorous to say the least. After several years of trying, modification of rain rates from some storms was\u00a0successful<\/a>, although it would never be possible to prove that any one storm had been changed.<\/p>\n Early on Tuesday morning, April 16, the chat network of my school class which is replete with global insights after 40 years of dispersion, lit up with reports of unprecedented rain from Brendan in Bahrain and Ant in Dubai. Ant is a pilot and was flying out of Dubai that morning. He duly relayed photographs of his flight over the saturated desert.<\/p>\n Clouds above Saudi Arabia\u2019s \u2018Empty Quarter\u2019 desert, April 16. The big vertical cloud is a cumulonimbus (thundercloud) near the edge of the major storm cluster which is far larger. The outflow from the main storm is the dark stuff at the very top of the photo. Ant McHale<\/p><\/div>\n Parts of the Arabian Peninsula received\u00a018 months of rainfall<\/a>\u00a0in 24 hours that Tuesday. The airport looked\u00a0more like a harbour<\/a>. 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. Dubai International Airport has recorded nearly 160 mm (6.3 inches) of rain in the last 24 hours. For context, most of the Duba\u00ef metro typically averages 3.5 inches per year. <\/p>\n This is truly a historic event for the area. pic.twitter.com\/wm9rTNCokS<\/a><\/p>\n — Nahel Belgherze (@WxNB_) April 16, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n A perfect storm<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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