Rama Krishna Sangem
75 year old records broken as desert kingdom Dubai witnessed heavy rain fury this week. The rain disaster nearly shaken the oil rich country like never before. This is nothing but a clear sign of climate crisis, say a story put out by Bloomberg on April 20, Saturday.
The heavy rains that flooded Dubai this week halted air traffic, damaged buildings and streets — and left climate experts and common citizens asking whether one of the world’s hottest and driest cities should be better prepared for extreme storms.
Weather forecasters knew days in advance that a major storm was heading for the United Arab Emirates and authorities issued warnings asking citizens to stay home. Yet its largest city Dubai was still brought to a halt this week, with one of the worst rain events in decades flooding streets, homes and highways.
“Stormwater management systems were historically deemed an ‘unnecessary cost’ due to the limited rainfall” in the UAE, said Karim Elgendy, an associate fellow at the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House. “As the variability of rainfall increases across the region and as the likelihood of such events rises, the economic case for such systems becomes stronger.”
Man made climate change
Man made climate change is making extreme weather events like heat and rain more intense, frequent and harder to predict. The Middle East is forecast to face higher temperatures and a decline in overall rainfall, according to long-term scientific projections. But these very arid places will also experience storms that drop unprecedented rain, according to researchers. That’s forcing governments to consider whether to adapt to rare but destructive events — and how.
Representatives for the UAE government didn’t immediately reply to a written request for comment.
“It’s a real tradeoff in thinking about the cost and the opportunity costs,” said Linda Shi, an assistant professor specializing in urban climate adaptation at Cornell University in the US. “These events are likely to be erratic and unpredictable.”
The UAE was battered on Tuesday by its heaviest downpour since records began in 1949. Scientists and weather forecasters attribute the storm to a large amount of moisture rising from warming seas to the atmosphere, before falling as rain over to the Arabian Peninsula.
Impact of El Nino?
El Niño, the climate phenomenon that makes seas warmer and alters weather patterns globally, may have affected the storm. Climate change can’t be ruled out as a factor, though more detailed studies are needed to establish its exact influence, several climatologists and forecasters told Bloomberg Green.
“While massive floods like this have occurred in the past, the huge scale and intensity of the rainfall that caused it are exactly what we are seeing more of in our warmer world,” said Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in the UK. “With so much rain falling all at once, even carefully designed drainage systems will struggle to cope.”
The floods drew immediate attention to the UAE’s cloud-seeding program, which involves injecting particles into clouds that can influence rainfall. But it will take “significant data analysis” to ascertain the role, if any, it played in making the rains more extreme, according to Auroop Ganguly, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “Often major floods in a city relate to urban drainage and related infrastructures,” he said.
Will Dubai see many more such natural disasters? Need to wait and see.
