University of Reading denies responsibility for Dubai floods

England’s University of Reading has denied that its cloud-seeding technique was to blame for extreme flooding in Dubai after the worst rainfall since records began in 1949, writes Sarah Knapton for The Telegraph.

Meteorology experts at the university have been working with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the past few years on a project to electrically charge clouds and produce raindrops. On Sunday, two days before the region had a year-and-a-half’s worth of rainfall in one day (5.6 inches), the UAE carried out cloud-seeding efforts, according to flight-tracking data, analysed by AP.

Ahmed Habib, a meteorologist at UAE’s National Center of Meteorology, told Bloomberg that several cloud-seeding planes were flown in the days before the extreme weather. But the University of Reading said that even if cloud seeding had been carried out in the days running up to the storm, it could not have caused such a deluge. The team also said that the UAE had been using chemical seeding rather than the electrical charge technique developed in Britain.
Full report on the MSN site