The water crisis in the Middle East is serious and seemingly getting worse all the time. Water scarcity is causing problems across the entire region and threatening to stir up unrest. However, some Middle Eastern nations are taking the lead in utilizing technology to mitigate the water issue. Foremost among those nations is the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a small gulf country blessed with massive oil wealth. Now, the UAE is investing some of those petrodollars into creating artificial rainfall, a project they hope will alleviate the worst of the region’s water woes.
Making It Rain, Artificially
The UAE is a relatively small nation, but it ranks fourth in the entire world in daily water use per capita. This makes the country especially interested in producing as much water as possible domestically. One project that has been going on for a little more than a decade involves seeding clouds to produce rainfall. The basic idea of cloud seeding started almost by accident in the United States just after the Second World War. Scientists found that dropping dry ice into clouds caused reactions that resulted in the production of moisture. Experimentation with different chemical agents refined the process over the decades.
In 2010 a Swiss-based company called Meteo Systems tried out various methods of using electrical towers to ionize the atmosphere to create clouds artificially. To date, the company has spent over $18 million on this technology. The results have not been as good as desired, but the basic idea has inspired the UAE to undertake cloud seeding efforts of its own.
The major benefit of cloud seeding is cost. Other methods of water creation or reclamation are already in use but are very expensive. “Desalination, for example, is foolproof but it’s also expensive, at 50 to 60 cents [US] per cubic meter of fresh water,” said Zev Levin, a Helmholtz International Fellow at the Energy, Environment, and Water Research Center at the Cyprus Institute, “and produces side effects for the environment, such as a high saline discharge.”
Cloud seeding can be done for a fraction of the price of desalinization, which would be a huge boon for some of the lower-income countries in the Middle East such as Jordan and Lebanon.
Other Problems with Cloud Seeding Technology
One major hurdle to the UAE’s cloud seeding operations is Iran. Iranian officials claim that the UAE’s cloud seeding is causing less rainfall in Iran, effectively accusing the Emirates of stealing Iran’s rain. While this might seem trivial and absurd at first, it is indicative of the importance placed on water resources in the Middle East. Iraq has already accused Iran of causing severe disturbances in the flow of water from the Tigris River due to Iran’s use of dams to divert river flow. Middle East experts worry that tensions over scarce water supplies could escalate into armed conflict between neighboring nations.
Traditional cloud seeding methods require existing clouds with the potential for rainfall, a situation that doesn’t always exist in the arid climate of many parts of the Middle East. Some types of clouds cannot produce rain, making the process of identifying usable clouds difficult. The UAE keeps pilots on alert for cloud seeding operations around the clock to make sure that they can reach the clouds in time to try to produce the precious rainfall. Also, pilots must be very cautious when seeding clouds. There is always the potential for accidents when performing the tricky operation, and the resulting rainfall can cause hazardous conditions for pilots as well.
Many climate scientists dispute the efficiency of cloud seeding. They point to the inability to get accurate information on the increase in the amount of rainfall the cloud seeding causes. This is because it is nearly impossible to determine whether the clouds would have produced rainfall, and how much, if the seeding hadn’t been done. Or, as happened in 2019, it may cause so much additional rainfall that severe flooding can quickly occur. Scientists contend that there are just too many unknowns concerning cloud seeding to make any definitive judgments about its efficacy.
In the UAE, it will take years of careful monitoring to determine how successful cloud seeding has been. The country continues to lead the way in advancing technology to help with the water crisis in the Middle East. Not all of its operations are likely to be successful, but the need for reliable sources of freshwater is so great that the efforts are well worth any costs associated with them. Other Middle Eastern nations, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are following the lead of the UAE and developing their own projects that they hope will meet the needs of their people.