CBS News
What is cloud seeding and did it play any role in the Dubai floods?
Stranded airline passengers and a cat submerged in floodwaters clinging to a car door handle became notable moments this week in Dubai as the normally arid city was inundated with historic levels of rain. Claims have gone viral that the deluge was brought on by cloud seeding, a technique that aims to increase precipitation, that is heavily utilized in the United Arab Emirates.
But is it really to blame?
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that getting to the bottom of the “record-shattering extreme rainfall” requires breaking down the science behind the event and the technique.
“There’s currently a disconnect in the online discourse between the kind of human activities that likely did affect it (greenhouse warming) versus those which have actually been the focus of the online conversation thus far (cloud seeding), and what this means for how we collectively understand our ability to actively affect the weather on different spatial and temporal scales,” he said in an emailed statement.
What is cloud seeding?
Many have questioned since the downpour in Dubai whether cloud seeding was to blame. But what is cloud seeding and how does it work exactly?
Cloud seeding is a technique used to improve precipitation. According to the Desert Research Institute, scientists do this by putting tiny particles called nuclei into the atmosphere that attach to clouds.
“These nuclei provide a base for snowflakes to form. After cloud seeding takes place, the newly formed snowflakes quickly grow and fall from the clouds back to the surface of the Earth, increasing snowpack and streamflow,” the institute says.
In the Middle East, instead of precipitation in the form of snow, its cloud seeding program generates increased rain.
Scientists typically go about cloud seeding in two ways – using either generators on the ground or distributing the nuclei via aircraft.
Christopher Pike/Bloomberg via Getty Images
What caused the rain in Dubai?
But was the rain in Dubai from cloud seeding?
“Did cloud seeding play a role? Likely no,” Swain said. “But how about climate change? Likely yes!”
The world is continuing to see month after month of record-breaking heat and 2023 was the hottest year globally ever recorded. Scientists have found that warmer temperatures increase evaporation, resulting in more frequent and intense storms, such as the one that occurred in Dubai. Those conditions also fuel other extreme weather events, including droughts, putting opposing forces at intense odds that will likely strain communities without adequate adaptation.
Andrew Kruczkiewicz, senior researcher at Columbia Climate School, told CBS News he doesn’t believe there’s any current evidence at this time that cloud seeding pushed the downpour over the edge.
“This event was forecast fairly well days in advance and I think it’s unlikely that a cloud seeding operation would move forward given the well-forecast intense rainfall,” he said.
The nation’s National Emergency Crisis and Management Authority issued weather warnings on Monday before the storm’s arrival, urging people to comply with local instructions from authorities and asking them to stay at home and only leave in the case of an emergency.
Meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, gave the Associated Press a more definitive answer: “It’s most certainly not cloud seeding.”
“If that occurred with cloud seeding, they’d have water all the time,” he said. “…when it comes to controlling individual rain storms, we are not anywhere close to that. And if we were capable of doing that, I think we would be capable of solving many more difficult problems than creating a rain shower over Dubai.”
The deluge, he said, “speaks more to questions around what are the resilience measures that are integrated into the urban planning standard operating procedures.”
“Almost everywhere on Earth there is a risk of flash flooding,” he said. “Yet, since it’s not the most frequent type of extreme event, sometimes it’s lower on the priority list when decisions need to be made around infrastructure or resilience, or just urban development more broadly.”
How significant was the flooding in Dubai?
More than 5.59 inches of rain fell over Dubai within 24 hours. While a half-foot of rain may not seem like much numerically, that’s more than what the city sees in an average year, and other parts of the UAE saw even higher levels.
It was a “historic weather event,” the state-run WAM news agency said, adding that it was beyond “anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949.”
Dubai is normally dry and with a downpour like this being so unprecedented, the city’s infrastructure was not prepared. The drainage systems were overwhelmed and Dubai International Airport, one of the busiest in the world, had to temporarily halt operations. One plane passenger told Reuters many people were waiting more than 12 hours to be able to resume travel. Footage from the airport shows planes taxiing in eerie floodwaters.
“Over a year’s worth of rainfall was experienced in just a few hours,” Kruczkiewicz told CBS News. “And why that’s important to to understand is that when you see this amount of rainfall in semi-arid arid area, the soil isn’t designed to filter the water as fast as in other areas. … You don’t need that much water falling or rainfall falling in a short period of time to cause major issues.”
Is cloud seeding effective?
According to the Desert Research Institute, how effective cloud seeding is depends on the specific project in which it’s being used. Citing several studies, the institute said it’s helped increase overall snowpack in some areas by at least 10% per year. Another study found that a five-year project in New South Wales, Australia resulted in a 14% snowfall increase.
The UAE’s National Center of Meteorology launched the Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science to advance the technology, saying that for dryer regions across the world, cloud seeding “could offer a viable, cost-effective supplement to existing water supplies.” Many regions even beyond the Middle East have been suffering from water scarcity issues, including Colombia, Mexico and Hawaii.
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail” and other acclaimed films whose work on “Chinatown” became a model of the art form and helped define the jaded allure of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne “passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family” Monday at his home in Los Angeles, his publicist Carri McClure, told CBS News in a statement. She did not provide a cause of death.
In an industry which gave birth to rueful jokes about the writer’s status, Towne for a time held prestige comparable to the actors and directors he worked with. Through his friendships with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the signature films of an era when artists held an unusual level of creative control. The rare “auteur” among screen writers, Towne managed to bring a highly personal and influential vision of Los Angeles onto the screen.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for AFI
“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It’s the westernmost west of America. It’s a sort of place of last resort. It’s a place where, in a word, people go to make their dreams come true. And they’re forever disappointed.”
Recognizable around Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three other times, for “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and entirely (original),” said “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant on X.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s business, a dress shop, closed down because of the Great Depression. His father changed the family name to Towne.
Towne’s success came after a long stretch of working in television, including “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” and on low-budget movies for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business story, he owed his breakthrough in part to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. As Beatty worked on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set while the movie was filmed in Texas.
Towne’s contributions were uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark crime film released in 1967, and for years he was a favorite ghost writer. He helped out on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait” among others and referred to himself as a “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning, not pitch the whole game.” But Towne was credited by name for Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s sex comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a private detective asked to follow the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Gittes finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne resurrected the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but cast Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey across a grander and more insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues accumulate into a timeless detective tale, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by one of the most repeated lines in movie history, words of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
The back story of “Chinatown” has itself become a kind of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”; in Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a history of 1960s-1970s Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye,” dedicated entirely to “Chinatown.” In “The Big Goodbye,” published in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost writer — former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to “The Big Goodbye,” for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor did not ask for credit on the film because his “friendship with Robert” mattered more.
The studios assumed more power after the mid-1970s and Towne’s standing declined. His own efforts at directing, including “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” had mixed results. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a commercial and critical disappointment when released in 1990 and led to a temporary estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Around the same time, he agreed to work on a movie far removed from the art-house aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer production “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a race car driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 movie was famously over budget and mostly panned, although its admirers include Quentin Tarantino and countless racing fans. And Towne’s script popularized an expression used by Duvall after Cruise complains another car slammed him: “He didn’t slam into you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t nudge you. He rubbed you.
“And rubbin,′ son, is racin.'”
Towne later worked with Cruise on “The Firm” and the first two “Mission: Impossible” movies. His most recent film was “Ask the Dust,” a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that came out in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two children. His brother, Roger Towne, also wrote screenplays, his credits include “The Natural.”
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
