The announcement got here following the pledge made by the UAE on Saturday to allocate $150 million in new funding for water safety options

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Given its development in cloud seeding, the UAE will actively share its data and expertise in rain-enhancement know-how to assist deal with water shortage in lots of components of the world.

This was shared by Omar Al Yazeedi, deputy director normal of the National Centre of Meteorology (NCM), to Khaleej Times on the sidelines of the continued COP28 or the twenty eighth assembly of the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai.

The announcement got here following the pledge made by the UAE on Saturday to allocate $150 million in new funding for water safety options in susceptible nations. Water is on high of the UAE’s agenda on the UN Climate Summit, the place water specialists are actively collaborating to handle the challenges of world warming.

Al Yazeedi famous the UAE has been on the forefront of rain-enhancement science for greater than twenty years, and cloud-seeding has helped improve the nation’s annual rainfall and lowered its reliance on seawater desalination.

“We are happy to share our knowledge with other countries participating at COP28,” he added.

Noting that just about half of the world’s inhabitants may face excessive water stress by 2030, Al Yazeedi identified rain enhancement is a viable and economical different water answer appropriate for arid and semi-arid areas.

Cloud seeding, Al Yazeedi defined, “can increase the amount of rainfall by 15 to 25 per cent and this will help recharge groundwater and enhance freshwater supply, which in turn will benefit local agriculture and boost food security.”

Al Yazeedi mentioned the nation is persistently enhancing cloud-seeding know-how with its UAE Research Programme for Rain Enhancement Science (UAEREP), geared toward offering as much as $1.5 million funding to a profitable proposal. The programme has additionally demonstrated that cloud seeding is a dependable technique for rain enhancement.

The key issue to profitable cloud-seeding is recognizing the suitable convective clouds with rain-bearing capability. A particular plane is used to shoot salt flares into these clouds to reinforce rainfall and in April this 12 months, the NCM added extra superior cloud-seeding plane to its fleet.

Last 12 months, the UAE performed 311 cloud-seeding missions, clocking up round 1,000 flying hours. According to Al Yazeedi, cloud-seeding is loads cheaper than desalinating sea water. A cubic metre of water produced by cloud-seeding is simply 1 fil as in comparison with 60 fils wanted to desalinate the identical quantity of water.

He additionally assured that cloud-seeding is protected for people and the surroundings. The materials used is a combination of salt (sodium chloride, potassium chloride) that’s carried out into the center of the cloud to activate the condensation course of and “make the water heavy to fall to the ground.”

“The cloud area is huge – we only use between 800 grams to one kilo of salt to an area of about 30km by 40km and the height of the cloud can sometimes go up to 18km from the base. Our aim for cloud-seeding is to increase both the amount of rainfall and its duration,” he added.

Aside from cloud-seeding, one other local weather resiliency marketing campaign the NCM is pushing at COP28 is the promotion of ‘Early Warnings for All,’ a world initiative by the World Meteorological Organisation – the place the UAE is presently its president – geared toward catastrophe danger discount.

Al Yazeedi famous early warning programs are a should to avoid wasting lives and scale back financial losses in any pure disasters. “NCM will help to cover some gaps in the field of observation and early warning, especially in countries and communities that lack weather stations, radars, or access to satellites.”