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Earth

What Caused the Storm That Brought Dubai To a Standstill? 63

Posted by msmash from the unnatural-sights dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: A storm hit the United Arab Emirates and Oman this week bringing record rainfall that flooded highways, inundated houses, grid-locked traffic and trapped people in their homes. [...] In the UAE, a record 254 millimetres (10 inches) of rainfall was recorded in Al Ain, a city bordering Oman. It was the largest ever in a 24-hour period since records started in 1949. Rainfall is rare in the UAE and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, that is typically known for its dry desert climate. Summer air temperatures can soar above 50 degrees Celsius. But the UAE and Oman also lack drainage systems to cope with heavy rains and submerged roads are not uncommon during rainfall.

Following Tuesday's events, questions were raised whether cloud seeding, a process that the UAE frequently conducts, could have caused the heavy rains. Cloud seeding is a process in which chemicals are implanted into clouds to increase rainfall in an environment where water scarcity is a concern. The UAE, located in one of the hottest and driest regions on earth, has been leading the effort to seed clouds and increase precipitation. But the UAE's meteorology agency told Reuters there were no such operations before the storm. The huge rainfall was instead likely due to a normal weather system that was exacerbated by climate change, experts say. A low pressure system in the upper atmosphere, coupled with low pressure at the surface had acted like a pressure 'squeeze' on the air, according to Esraa Alnaqbi, a senior forecaster at the UAE government's National Centre of Meteorology. That squeeze, intensified by the contrast between warmer temperatures at ground level and colder temperatures higher up, created the conditions for the powerful thunderstorm, she said.
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What Caused the Storm That Brought Dubai To a Standstill? More

What Caused the Storm That Brought Dubai To a Standstill?

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  • They have money (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @02:25PM (#64402162)

    Let them fix the problem with drainage systems and massive reservoirs. If they keep getting rain, it could be a massive boon for all the countries in the region.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by t0qer ( 230538 )
      I've had a theory about global warming. Basically if most of the earths water is locked up in the poles, this would cause arid regions to form. Releasing the water in the poles would have the opposite effect, causing more rainfall than normal since a greater surface area of the earth would be covered in water, likely swamp like forests. If we look back at the start of the Carboniferous period, the earth was fairly warm, taken from this Berkeley publication. [berkeley.edu]

      The beginning of the Carboniferous generally ha

      • I've had a theory about global warming. Basically if most of the earths water is locked up in the poles,

        Most of the Earth's water is in the oceans.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

        Basically if most of the earths water is locked up in the poles, this would cause arid regions to form.

        Your theory is the opposite of reality.

        As temperatures rise, the ice caps melt, and deserts are expanding, not shrinking.

        at the start of the Carboniferous period, the earth was fairly warm

        There were warm regions and inland seas, but there were also large ice caps and big deserts.

      • It is true that the slightly increased surface area will likely lead to slightly increased cloud formation, but the increased heat causes increased wind, which increases the atmospheric carrying capacity and increases the strength of high altitude wind patterns that create dry pockets.

        Also, a humid environment relies on large amounts of plants. If you have more extreme weather with long periods of drought followed by heavy rain, even if the rain was so heavy that the total longterm rain had increased, you'd

        • Re:They have money (Score:4)

          by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @04:25PM (#64402612) Homepage Journal

          Also, a humid environment relies on large amounts of plants. If you have more extreme weather with long periods of drought followed by heavy rain, even if the rain was so heavy that the total longterm rain had increased, you'd have much less forest cover, and less humidity. You'd likely have a semi-arid region instead.

          But this is your theory, vs my theory. We can't accurately predict what would become arid vs what would become a lush jungle again. There are some knowns, like we know where all the sinks and former lake beds are in the world, and we know that if there was enough rain those would fill up again. 1. Dead Sea, Jordan/Israel - 414 meters below sea level ... 2. Lake Assal, Djibouti - 155 meters below sea level ... 3. Turpan Pendi, China - 154 meters below sea level ... 4. Qattara Depression, Egypt - 133 meters below sea level ... 5. Vpadina Kaundy, Kazakhstan - 132 meters below sea level ... What we do know is a lot of these sinks (Dead sea especially) became more hostile to life as they dried up and salinity increased. All life, plants, aquatic and on land. If these basins were to refill and salinity diluted enough, there's a good chance that we could see life appearing in and around their shores again, which in turn could lead to a broader stabilization of flora/fauna as fauna tends to spread seed.

      • Basically if most of the earths water is locked up in the poles, this would cause arid regions to form.

        Sadly this theory is extremely wrong because most of our surface water is in the oceans and despite water being locked up in the poles some of the driest places on the planet are Antarctica's Dry Valleys, right next to the Antarctic ice sheet just as on the Arabian peninsular and elsewhere there are deserts adjacent to oceans. Whether a place is arid is determined by the local climate which is dependent on a host of factors such as prevailing wind direction, local topology etc. not the amount of polar ice

      • > The main difference though is as humans, we're the only species smart enough to do things like build storm walls, reservoirs, and flood control measures

        I think the beavers might disagree with that :)

  • Sureâ¦.. (Score:2, Troll)

    by ZERO1ZERO ( 948669 )
    > But the UAE's meteorology agency told Reuters there were no such operations before the storm. The huge rainfall was instead likely due to a normal weather system that was exacerbated by climate change, experts say.

    Ok. If it was an expert that said it then it must be true.

    • What do you think caused it?

      • Re:Sureâ¦.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @03:02PM (#64402334)
        Are we completely sure that this was caused by anything and wasn't entirely within the realm of possible, but unlikely weather? Highly improbable events occur all the time.

        People who insist every single weather event is due to climate change aren't much different than the sort who think the weather is all government controlled or that everything is secretly somehow the fault of the Jews. Go back far enough and there was likely a rainfall just as large or even larger. Since it would have happened before anyone could accurately measure it and probably before the industrial revolution, I'm sure it was probably blamed on the gods being angry.

        • Are we completely sure that this was caused by anything and wasn't entirely within the realm of possible, but unlikely weather? Highly improbable events occur all the time.

          Fair point. As has been said here time and again, climate is not weather, and while global warming may increase the frequency of some types of extreme weather events, you can't attribute any particular storm, not even a severe one, to climate change.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shilly ( 142940 )

            Not true any more. I suggest checking back at the website below in a few weeks, when they've had a chance to run the analysis. If you click into he link for any of the analyses they've run, you can see how they quantify the attributions.

            https://www.worldweatherattrib... [worldweath...bution.org]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          While it is almost impossible to attribute a specific event to climate change or any other cause, looking at the frequency with which these things happen, there is a very clear correlation.

          The only way to prove it would be to undo what we did, and see if the frequency decreases. If it doesn't... Well, we cleaned up the planet for nothing.

        • People who insist every single weather event is due to climate change aren't much different than the sort who think the weather is all government controlled or that everything is secretly somehow the fault of the Jews.

          For the most part the only people who insist a weather event is caused by climate change are those who distil news down to the lowest IQ denominator and those who repeat it. When you follow the news stories back to the underlying science you'll see the fundamental story is that climate change makes severe weather events on average worse, and more frequent.

          Climate change makes the unlikely weather increasingly more likely. That has already been shown. And that is the difference between climate and weather, w

        • The area I live in now (SW Virginia) had some insane floods in the 1920s-1930s. Old pictures showing rivers 40-50 feet above their normal level, and a quarter mile wide, that washed away railroad trestles leaving just the massive stone piles which are there to this day. Looking at them, and how tall they are above the water, it's unbelievable that the water could have ever been that high (and in order to be that high it had to flood an extremely wide area as well).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ichthus ( 72442 )

        What do you think caused it?

        Probably... a storm formed. That's what caused the storm. It formed. Kind of like all of the other storms that have formed throughout the history of our storm forming planet.

    • "Multiple reports, including Bloomberg, cited meteorologists at the countryâ(TM)s National Center for Meteorology saying the agency had flown six or seven cloud seeding flights in the lead-up to the storm"

      • * Only one cloud seeding flight is on the logs.
        * The rains were announced days ahead on the weather report.

        So there's that, too.

        If man had any hand in this, it was by relentlessly keeping on flying and pumping CO2 into the air, with total disregard for what the global meteorological community has said for decennia.

        The world's busiest airport shit down by floods? I call karma.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MachineShedFred ( 621896 )

      So you are contending that we shouldn't be listening to experts in their field of study, to comment on their field of study?

      Let me guess, you'd rather hear from fucking idiots with no credentials or measure of official understanding on social media, because other stuff they say aligns with the rest of the pressure waves bouncing around inside your personal echo chamber?

      Go fuck yourself with that bullshit. That's how big problems become insurmountable problems.

      And what's your non-expert theory you'd like to

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shilly ( 142940 )

        The thing that pisses me off about these folks and their skepticism is that it is so domain-specific. You never see them claiming they know more than experts in, say, material science, or acoustics, or phytology, or quantum thermodynamics. They are totally happy to rely on the science and technology that provides them with nutritious food, warm clothing, electricity and hot water, the devices on which they write their ramblings, the cars with which they roll coal, etc. If they got a cataract, you can bet yo

  • So absurd to pose this as a mystery (Score:3, Informative)

    by shilly ( 142940 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @02:31PM (#64402196)

    The answer is the same as for the floods and fires in Australia, the fires in Greece, the floods in Pakistan, etc etc. A hotter, wetter atmosphere drives more extreme weather events, and we have created a hotter, wetter atmosphere through climate change because we burn too much fossil fuel.

    It’s not fucking cloud seeding. It’s climate change. At least the fact that it’s happening in Dubai has some reasonable symbolism about it, given what Dubai represents and the role it played at COP. About time the chickens came home to roost

    • It is a bit of a sick joke that these Arabian countries who are perfectly suited with more than enough empty desert to provide all their electricity needs with solar (during the day anyway) mainly burn oil and gas instead.

      • UAE doesn't burn oil to generate electricity.

        They do burn gas, but much of it would otherwise be flared.

        UAE's liquefication plants and export terminals are already running at capacity.

        UAE plans to double their gas export capacity in the next few years, but peace in Ukraine is a risk.

      • Because they only pay the labor costs for gas and oil.

        • Like every other oil-and-gas producing nation. Though there are significant costs for the materiel of production - pipelines, pressure valves, etc. Their "cost per barrel to the wellhead" is lower than for some countries, but the main factor in that is always how much tax the government take. Which is how the West (UK, America, essentially ; some input from France) set up their oil economies in the 1930s to 1950s.

    • You'd have to expend a significant amount of energy to create the conditions for a big thunderstorm. Like burning all the fossil fuels we piped out of the ground for a hundred years.. Oh wait. We did that. Now we have more intense storms.
      The Middle East is very much more at war than usual, so the effects of all that air traffic and bombing could be creating their own seeding effect on the region.

    • I find it sadly funny that people will say 'human activity can't alter the climate, and besides, we know humans are altering the climate with cloud seeding, chem trails, and the HAARP weather control lasers!'

  • God wills it

  • I'm trying hard to care about a country whose image is freely hosting hog butchering and other internet scams [google.com] as well as being a lawless paradise for the wealthy.

  • Obviously it was caused by the Deep Puddle State.

  • You think we can explain the weather? What is this, 2015?

    "Too bad the post office isn't as efficient as the weather service."

  • The question is, how can we repeat it?

  • Utter Bollocks

    I lived in Jeddah in the 1990s in Saudi Arabia and you were guaranteed rain towards the end of winter and lots of it.

    I remember a foot of water in the city and flooding everywhere on a number of occasions. The fact that it's very flat plus so much roads and compounds walls means the water has nowhere to go.

  • space laser coordinates were off?

  • There is two types of people (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday April 18, 2024 @12:41AM (#64403606)

    Those that understand Science and statistical effects and those that do not. The first class knows that this was not "caused" by climate change, but that climate change made it much more likely, exactly as predicted. The second class is clueless anyways and there is no way to change that.

  • Looks like his MO, according to that Old Testament.

  • "But it's a dry heat!"

  • ...is bought to you by it's sponsors Pepsi, Budweiser and Nike.

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