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Praying for rain

The late ruler of the UAE His Highness Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan was a keen advocate of self-sufficiency for the UAE, particularly in agricultural produce.

Under his direction, great tracts of desert around Abu Dhabi were transformed into farms and forests that have became not only sufficient to feed the UAE, but also made it a net exporter of foodstuff.
Having overcome the harshest desert conditions to create a green belt for the city, it was a natural extension of his vision to find a way to keep plants alive without pumping vast quantities of expensive and environmentally damaging desalinated water into the area.

In January 2000, during an extended period of drought, His Highness gave school children a day off to give them time to join the rest of the country (and indeed the rest of the GCC) in praying for rain.

But he didn't rely on faith alone to affect rainfall. The UAE government was also investigating the science of weather modification.

Sheikh Zayed died before his dream of artificially creating rain became a reality. In April 2005, six months after his death, the work he began appeared to bear fruit. Small planes dispersed small plastic hydrogen bombs into clouds that broke water droplets apart into their component hydrogen and oxygen molecules. These molecules ascended rapidly through the cloud, freezing as they rose. This "super cooling" created ice crystals that became too heavy for the cloud to carry and they fell to earth as rain.

The experiment lasted four days, and brought "moderate rain" to the Northern Emirates, according to officials at the time.

Super cooling is the key to squeezing precipitation out of clouds that stubbornly refuse to rain. (There has so far been no success in conjuring up rain from clear blue skies).

The technique was first shown to have worked in 1946, when three General Electric scientists discovered that seeding clouds with dry ice of silver iodide triggered the super cooling process.

A large-scale trial three years later in 1949 discovered that the cloud seeding process using only a few kilos of silver iodide was - possibly - far more effective than the scientists expected.

They could not accurately predict how much rain or snow a cloud would have produced before the seeding, but they were shocked by the deluge that occurred after their intervention. It appeared that a chain reaction had occurred that led to more than one inch of snow falling per hour across a one hundred square mile area.

General Electric, while excited by the scientific breakthrough, became afraid of the potential legal liability of their newfound power, so the company passed its research to the US government.

Over the next 25 years, controlling the weather became viewed as a strategic weapon with the potential to alter the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. So much so that US Strategic Air Commander, General George Kenney, declared before his retirement in 1951, that no less was at stake than the domination of the world.

Despite billions being spent on research, little quantifiable progress has been made since the early post-war experiments. Today, the Chinese are investing most in the technology, but even here the results are far from conclusive.

Earlier this year, a reporter for Vanity Fair magazine visited the semi-arid Xinjiang region of north-east China to witness efforts to modify the weather. Thousands of rockets have been fired at clouds with the aim of wringing rain from them, but when the reporter asked the programme's director whether it really worked, he replied: "That's a big scientific question all over the world. Just by observation it's hard to see the difference. But why not?"

Over sixty years since the first super cooling experiments, the technique remains unproven to any normal scientific standards. The fact that it rained on Tuesday in the UAE is not conclusive evidence that the government's cloud seeding efforts had worked. Perhaps it was going to rain anyway.

Has the dream of Sheikh Zayed finally been realised? Who knows. But as he always maintained during his lifetime, if you pray hard enough for rain, it will eventually arrive.

Rob Corder is the Editorial Director of ITP Publishing Group.

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