The United Arab Emirates is to fund three research teams Studies on rain making in the desert of Arabia. The information, released in University World News (Mannoura Egaiz, 18 March 2016, Issue No:405), was first published by SciDev.Net in its Middle East and North Africa edition.
The teams, from Germany, Japan and the UAE, will share $5 million from the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science. Each team will tackle a different aspect of an evolving technology called cloud seeding — in which a chemical is injected into the atmosphere from an aircraft to encourage water condensation and cloud formation in the hope that it will rain. “[The programme] will secure the UAE’s water supplies in the long run, and support innovation to reach future solutions that enhance water security in the region and the world,” says programme director Alya Al Mazroui.
As part of the project, a team from Germany will try to find the best spots for seeding by looking at how weather convergence zones — places where two prevailing air flows meet — interact with land cover. The Japanese team will seek to develop new algorithms to identify the clouds most likely to be successfully seeded.
The UAE team, led by Linda Zou, an environmental engineer at the UAE’s Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, . . .
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