April 18, 2024 Thursday Morning Update

Cloud seeding most certainly not responsible for extreme Dubai rains

Cloud seeding in Dubai?

Nice quote by your humble correspondent in the national AP explainer on the unlikely contribution of cloud seeding to Dubai’s tropical downpour.

AP article link

“It’s most certainly not cloud seeding,” said private meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If that occurred with cloud seeding, they’d have water all the time. You can’t create rain out of thin air per se and get 6 inches of water. That’s akin to perpetual motion technology.”

“It’s maybe a little bit of a human conceit that, yeah, we can control the weather in like a Star Trek sense,” Maue, who was appointed to NOAA by then-President Donald Trump, said. “Maybe on long time scales, climate time scales, we’re affecting the atmosphere on long time scales. But when it comes to controlling individual rain storms, we are not anywhere close to that. And if we were capable of doing that, I think we would be capable of solving many more difficult problems than creating a rain shower over Dubai.”

The proximate cause of the extreme rainfall in Dubai and elsewhere on the Arabian peninsula was a wave train of cut-off lows. The 500 hPa geopotential height anomaly shows the trio of cut-offs along the curly-q’s of the omega ridges. This pattern can produce extreme weather wherever it occurs around the Earth in the middle-latitudes as the circulation advects moisture from the south and focuses it in narrow atmospheric-river like convergence bands.

The precipitable water amounts of 2 to 3 inches over the USA and Oman = boatloads of moisture potential for extreme flooding.

And, ECMWF model generated precipitation nicely predicted the extreme amounts > 9.4” in 24-hours.

Thursday High Temperatures

Quick comparison between Blend of Models 4.2 and NDFD NWS

Yet another hot day for the eastern U.S. including the Ohio Valley and Southeast well into the 80s. Chilly day across the northern Rockies and Dakotas only in the 30s and 40s. New England is also only in the 40s except for Maine in the 50s and 60.

The NWS NDFD forecast for high temperatures is a bit warmer in the Carolinas with 90s, but the two forecasts compare very well on the national average.

Thursday Morning Temperatures 5:00 AM ET

Still 18% of the Lower 48 at/below freezing mainly across the Mountain West and Maine. Mild again south of the frontal boundary — the focus of severe weather later on Thursday.

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