DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — The United Arab Emirates has been trying hard to curb the dwindling of its precious underground water table. <br /><br />To this end, it invested $15 million in nine different rain-making projects in 2017. <br /><br />This investment seemed to pay off this past week when the desert country was blessed with very rare torrential rain. Here are the details:<br /><br />The Independent reports that the United Arab Emirates has been abuzz with excitement over very unusual torrential rain that fell in the desert country for a few days around Monday, July 19.<br /><br />On Twitter, the UAE's weather bureau hinted that much of this unseasonal downpour is due to its multi-million-dollar cloud seeding efforts. <br /><br />One of the ways in which the UAE seeds clouds, is by using electricity-inducing drones. The drones were developed by the UAE and researchers from the University of Reading in England. <br /><br />They get catapulted into the air and cruise through the sky, gathering weather data and giving a nudge to clouds in the form of an electrical charge. <br /><br />The idea is that the electrical charge helps clump water droplets and other particles together to make new and bigger clouds that actually have a chance to generate much-needed precipitation. <br /><br />This is important since the UAE typically receives only four inches, or 10 centimeters, of rain per year. <br /><br />The idea is to make the droplets inside the clouds big enough so that when they fall out of the cloud, they survive down to the surface.<br /><br />Some scientists think cloud seeding doesn't really work, while others think it works too well.<br /><br />They point at instances like China's heavy reliance on a weather-altering system. <br /><br />Experts have argued that this system could be weaponized to steal rain from neighboring countries like India. <br /><br />If it turns out that cloud seeding can indeed be used to steal rain from neighboring countries, we might even see wars for rain in the future.
