Desert city of Dubai floods as heaviest rainfall in 75 years hits UAE

By Reged Ahmad & Lorenzo Tondo

Heavy rains have hit the United Arab Emirates, flooding major highways and disrupting flights at Dubai international airport – in what the government has described as the largest amount of rainfall in the past 75 years.

At least one person was killed, a 70-year-old man who was swept away in his car in Ras Al Khaimah, one of the country’s seven emirates, police said, surpassing “anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949”.

The rains began on Monday night, and by Tuesday evening, more than 142mm (5.59in) had soaked the desert city of Dubai, normally the average amount it gets in a year and a half.

Rain also fell in Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, although the precipitation was particularly significant in the UAE.

An average year sees 94.7mm (3.73in) of rain at Dubai international airport, the world’s busiest for international travel and a hub for the long-haul carrier Emirates, which experienced “significant disruption”, it said on Wednesday.

Ahmed Habib, a meteorologist, told Bloomberg the heightened rainfall in the UAE might be attributed to the practice of “cloud seeding” in which government-operated small aircraft release salt flares into clouds to potentially enhance precipitation levels.

Some inland areas of the UAE recorded more than 80mm of rain over 24 hours to 8am on Tuesday, approaching the annual average of about 100mm. Rain is unusual in the UAE, on the arid Arabian peninsula, but occurs periodically during the cooler winter months.

Homes were flooded and vehicles were abandoned on roadways across Dubai as authorities sent tanker trucks into the streets to pump away the water. Many roads and other areas lack drainage given the lack of regular rainfall.

The major shopping centres Dubai Mall and Mall of the Emirates had flooding, with ankle-deep water in at least one Dubai Metro station, according to images posted on social media.

Lightning was seen flashing across the sky, occasionally touching the tip of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

The National Center for Meteorology in a post on X urged residents to “take all the precautions … and to stay away from areas of flooding and water accumulation”.

The UAE government media office posted on its X account that the downpours were an “exceptional” climate event. Even more rain is expected.

Schools were shut across the UAE and were expected to remain closed on Wednesday. Dubai’s government also extended remote working for its employees into Wednesday.

Dubai’s international airport also diverted some incoming flights on Tuesday.

Earlier the weather system caused floods across Bahrain, and left 18 dead in Oman, on the eastern edge of the Arabian peninsula, on Sunday and Monday, according to Agence France-Presse, including 10 schoolchildren swept away in a vehicle with an adult.

The UAE, which heavily relies on energy-hungry desalination plants to provide water, started cloud-seeding operations in 2002 to address water security issues, but the lack of drainage in many areas can trigger flooding.

Cloud seeding involves using aircraft or drones to add small particles of silver iodide, which has a structure similar to ice, to clouds. Water droplets cluster around the particles, modifying the structure of the clouds and increasing the chance of precipitation.

Cloud-seeding experiments have taken place since the 1940s but until recently there was little certainty the method had any positive impact.
Human-caused climate breakdown is supercharging extreme weather across the world, driving more frequent and more deadly disasters from heatwaves and wildfires to floods. At least a dozen of the most serious events of the last decade would have been all but impossible without human-caused global heating.

Extreme rainfall is more common and more intense because of human-caused climate breakdown across most of the world. This is because warmer air can hold more water vapour. It is most likely that flooding has become more frequent and severe as a result.

• Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report