What is behind the record downpour? | DW News

Now one of the world's busiest travel hubs, Dubai International Airport has partially resumed operations after heavy flooding forced it to close on Wednesday. The shutdown came after the United Arab Emirates was hit by a

record

storm. More rain fell in a 24-hour period than ever before, at least one person died and many homes and businesses were damaged after an unprecedented storm in the Gulf, the streets of Dubai turned to concrete. The rivers paralyzed the financial capital of the Middle East. Abandoned cars filled the streets and police found a feline resident. clinging to life saved at the last moment okay let us go at the busy Dubai airport the storm may have passed but the problems are far from over with so many planes on the ground taking up space little asphalt left for the newcomers inside Terminals are packed Stranded passengers trying to get a rebooking after their flights were cancelled.

There are hundreds and thousands of other passengers like me at this airport who have been waiting for 10 hours and 16 hours, some even 24 to 30 hours. It's not raining outside, the weather is clear. It's sunny, uh, waterlogging, the water level has dropped, although it's unclear to

what

extent climate change may have caused the historic rainfall. Experts say it's an example of the kind of extreme weather we can only expect to increase as temperatures rise around the world. climate change

what

we see a lot of um is that there is expected to be greater intensity of storms like this heavy rainfall um and greater conditions for forming storms to even begin to think about precipitation as the climate changes the gulf is expected to experience greater and more frequent storms, but for now there is more immediate work at hand clearing debris, clearing roads and assessing the damage from the historic

downpour

.

Let's get more out of Raku muta. He is an Earth system scientist and professor at the Indian Institute of Technology. He joins me from Mumbai. Good. To see you, eh, what explains these heavy

downpour

s? Yes, so this is a unique situation. It's all happening in a warmer world. We have now warmed about 1.2 1.3 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, so all climate events are happening in a warmer climate. What is unique? about this situation now is that we are right in the middle of an El Niño that is coming to an end, we can talk about what an elino is afterwards, but that tends to warm temperatures even more, so we add elino warming to global warming . and the Middle East and the Mediterranean are also a hot spot for warming, which is changing the winds over the Arabian Sea and the Arabian Sea is warming, which is pumping more moisture in certain circumstances into the Middle East, so We created these combinations to have a Western perspective. a disturbance coming from the Mediterranean called medical that ran into the circulation that was established in the Arabian Sea and just squeezed so much water out of this system that they got several years of rain in just a few hours.

Let's talk about it to contextualize what elino and lino are. If you think about the tropical Pacific, the Galapagos, which are so famous, it's generally cold under normal circumstances and when it's cold, it takes heat from the atmosphere and stores it in the ocean every few years because of what we call internal variability or variability. Naturally, the waters become much warmer than normal and much of the heat stored in the ocean is released and is called El Niño because it occurs around Christmas time. Elino means the child. as in the baby Jesus, the Spanish in the 18th century called him the gift of God or the little boy ELO and we are in the middle of that, so it added to the global warming that was already happening, so 2023 was a year

record

warm and is now transitioning to what is called elania, which means that in some years, especially after large elinos, as we just saw the waters around the Galapagos become much colder than normal, in which case another type of change is beginning to take place in India and the Middle East. region, so those changes were already happening and then we added this western disturbance that brings moisture from the Mediterranean Arabian Sea pumping out the moisture, so it's a combination of global warming and natural V.

I want to check one last thing with you while we have In the United Arab Emirates they sometimes resort to using cloud seeding for rain. It involves the use of compounds shot into clouds from airplanes or cannons to create raindrops. The UAE says that cloud seeding was not used in this particular case, but if it was done, could it create this amount of rain, so as soon as the flooding occurred, I looked to see if they were doing or had done the seeding. of clouds just before and there is no evidence that they did, but despite that, when you seed clouds, the existing clouds can drop some rain, but to create this amount of rain, you do not get this amount of water In the Middle East, in the deserts or even in the Mediterranean, you need a huge source of water and this happened with the last large-scale wind changes that brought water from Arabia.

The sea combined with medicine coming from the Mediterranean, so cloud seeding, even if it was happening, there was no way it would have produced such a massive amount of rain, so it should be left out. It's great to receive your ideas. Thank you so much.