Weather, or not?
According to the World Health Organization, a person needs around 20 litres of water a day – enough for cooking, cleaning, washing and drinking. But when you live in an arid climate and have a population of nearly 10 million people, it’s almost impossible to get to that quantity without being creative.
With an average rainfall figure of 100 mm per year – a tenth of the global mean – the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is one of the driest regions on Earth. So how does it get water? Right now, there are three sources: ground water, desalination, and what falls from the sky.
In 1982, the UAE’s first cloud-seeding operation took place in Abu Dhabi. In the 1990s, further weather-augmentation experiments were carried out and by the turn of the century, the UAE was at the forefront of cloud-seeding technology, working
