The Rainmakers: Can the UAE Bend the Sky to Fix Its Water Crisis?

High above the desert city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, veteran pilot Mark Newman sits waiting in the cockpit of a small propeller plane, his hand hovering near the control panel as he waits for the green light from mission control. When the call comes, he flicks a set of silver switches mounted by his leg, twists two black dials into place, and slams a gloved finger into the red button marked FIRE.

A slim canister bolted to his plane’s wing pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust into the air. The dust is nothing more exotic than ordinary table salt, coated in a nanoscale layer of water-attracting titanium dioxide. Updrafts of warm air carry the particles deep into the heart of puffy convective clouds that form regularly here, where Abu Dhabi’s rolling sand dunes meet the jagged mountains along the Omani border. In theory, the particles will pull water molecules toward them, forming tiny droplets that collide and merge with other droplets until they grow heavy enough to fall as rain.

This is cloud seeding, one of hundreds of missions Newman and his fellow pilots will fly this year as part of the UAE’s ambitious, decade-long push to boost rainfall across its desert landscape. From the copilot seat beside him, I watch red desert earth stretch unbroken to the horizon. The only visible body of water is a luxury hotel swimming pool, tucked into the mountainside below a sheikh’s palace, glinting like a cut gem in the sun.

More than 50 countries have experimented with cloud seeding since the 1940s—used to end droughts, refill hydroelectric reservoirs, keep ski resorts covered in snow, even as a weapon of war. In recent years, interest has surged again, driven partly by breakthroughs in atmospheric science, and partly by arid nations grappling with the early, brutal impacts of climate change. Like other technologies designed to treat the symptoms of a warming planet (think pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight), cloud seeding was once widely dismissed as controversial. Today, it is increasingly seen as a promising, even necessary tool. Droughts are growing longer and more severe: crops are withering across Spain and southern Africa, and cities from Bogotá to Cape Town have been forced to implement strict water rationing. In just the last nine months alone, cloud seeding has been proposed as a fix for toxic air pollution in Pakistan, a tool to prevent catastrophic Indonesian forest fires, and a lifeline to refill the shrinking Panama Canal.

China runs the world’s largest cloud seeding program, but keeps its operations closely guarded. No other nation has poured as much open ambition into advancing rainmaking science as the UAE. The country averages just 5 to 7 inches of rain a year—less than half the annual rainfall of Nevada, the driest U.S. state. The UAE launched its formal cloud seeding program in the early 2000s, and since 2015 has invested tens of millions of dollars into its global Rain Enhancement Program, funding cutting-edge research into new rainmaking technologies across the world.

When a single storm dumped a full year’s worth of rain on the UAE in 24 hours this past April, widespread flooding in Dubai was quickly blamed on cloud seeding. But the reality is far more nuanced. For more than a century, people from tribal leaders to con artists to military scientists to modern venture-backed tech entrepreneurs have claimed they can summon rain on command. But cloud seeding cannot create clouds out of thin air—it can only squeeze more precipitation out of clouds that already exist. Scientists still cannot confirm it works reliably at scale. The Dubai flood was almost certainly the result of a large regional storm system, worsened by climate change and the city’s inadequate drainage infrastructure.

The Rain Enhancement Program frames its mission as securing water access for future generations, both in the UAE and across all arid regions of the world. Program leaders call water security core to national security, and position the UAE as a global pioneer in innovative conservation and new climate tech. But the UAE—synonymous with luxury development and high-consumption lifestyles—has one of the highest per capita water usage rates on the planet. That leaves a pressing question unanswered: Is this a genuine effort to make a hotter, drier future livable for all? Or is this tiny petro-state, which built its vast wealth and influence on feeding the world’s fossil fuel addiction, trying to sell a “quick fix” for climate change to accrue even more power and profit? I traveled to the UAE to find out: Is this new wave of cloud seeding a real step toward human control of the weather, or just another overhyped, empty promise?

The Long, Dubious History of Trying to Make It Rain

The first organized attempt at human-induced rain dates back to August 5, 1891, when a train rolled into Midland, Texas carrying 8 tons of sulfuric acid, 7 tons of cast iron, half a ton of manganese oxide, six scientists, and several U.S. Civil War veterans. Leading the group were General Edward Powers, a Chicago civil engineer, and Major Robert George Dyrenforth, a former patent lawyer.

Powers had observed that rain often fell in the days after large battles, and theorized that concussions from artillery shook up upper-atmosphere air currents, forcing moisture to condense. He believed loud explosions could be used to summon rain on demand—either from hundreds of cannons pointed skyward, or balloons packed with explosives. After years of lobbying and publishing his book War and the Weather, he convinced the U.S. government to fund the unprecedented Midland experiment.

The team set up at a local cattle ranch and prepared to “attack” the sky. They built mortars from scrap pipe, stuffed dynamite into prairie dog burrows, and coated local bushes in rackarock, a coal-mining explosive. They built electrically charged kites and filled balloons with a hydrogen-oxygen mix, which Dyrenforth claimed would fuse into water when exploded. (Skeptics at the time noted it would have been cheaper and easier to just tie a jug of water to the balloon.)

The effort was plagued by technical misfortune: at one point a furnace caught fire, and a cowboy had to lasso it and drag it to a water tank to put out the blaze. By the time the team finished setting up, it had already started raining naturally. They pressed ahead anyway, unleashing a massive barrage of explosions on the night of August 17, and declared victory when rain fell again 12 hours later.

Their claim of success was flimsy at best. The team arrived in Texas right as the annual rainy season was beginning, and the U.S. Weather Bureau had already forecast rain before the experiment even started. Powers’ observation that rain follows battles was just a statistical fluke: battles are almost always launched in dry weather, so wet weather naturally follows more often than not.

Even with widespread skepticism from mainstream scientists and mockery in the press, the Midland experiment kicked off 50 years of pseudoscientific rainmaking schemes, with the Weather Bureau spending decades debunking self-proclaimed rainmakers across the country.

The most famous of these grifters was Charles Hatfield, nicknamed either the “Moisture Accelerator” or the “Ponzi of the Skies” depending on who you asked. Originally a sewing machine salesman from California, he reinvented himself as a weather mystic and struck dozens of deals with drought-stricken towns across the American West. When he arrived in a new area, he built a series of wooden towers, mixed a secret blend of 23 chemicals aged in oak casks, and poured the mixture into vats atop the towers to evaporate into the sky. His methods felt like witchcraft, but he was a master of playing the odds: in Los Angeles, he promised 18 inches of rain between mid-December and late April, a target that historical data gave a 50% chance of occurring even without his intervention.

While showmen like Hatfield lined their pockets, real scientists were slowly uncovering how rain actually forms, centered on the concept of cloud condensation nuclei. Even on the clearest days, the sky is full of tiny airborne particles—some no bigger than a pollen grain or a virus strand. “Every cloud droplet in Earth’s atmosphere formed around a pre-existing aerosol particle,” one leading cloud physicist explained to me. The mix of these particles varies by location: in the UAE, they include sulfates from the Empty Quarter desert, salt spray from the Persian Gulf, industrial pollution from regional oil refineries, and organic particles carried by winds all the way from India. Without these particles, there would be no clouds, no rain, no snow, no hail at all.

Most raindrops start as airborne ice crystals that melt as they fall to the ground. But without condensation nuclei, ice crystals can’t form until temperatures drop below -40°F. That leaves the atmosphere full of pockets of supercooled liquid water—water below freezing that still hasn’t turned solid.

In 1938, a German meteorologist first proposed that injecting artificial condensation nuclei into these pockets could trigger ice crystal formation. The crystals would grow large enough to fall, first as snow, then as rain when they hit warmer lower air. After World War II, scientists at General Electric picked up this idea. A team led by chemists Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir found that solid carbon dioxide—better known as dry ice—worked perfectly. When Schaefer dropped dry ice grains into a home freezer he was using as a makeshift cloud chamber, he saw water freeze instantly around the dry ice’s crystalline structure. A week later, when Langmuir saw the result, he scribbled three words in his notebook: “Control of Weather.” Within months, the team was dropping dry ice pellets from planes over Massachusetts’ Mount Greylock, creating a 3-mile-long trail of ice and snow.

Another GE scientist, Bernard Vonnegut, developed an even better seeding material: silver iodide. Its crystalline structure is almost identical to that of natural ice, and it works across a much wider range of temperatures. (Bernard’s brother Kurt, who worked as a GE publicist at the time, later wrote Cat’s Cradle, a novel centered on a fictional doomsday seeding material called ice-nine that freezes all of Earth’s water solid.)

After these early successes, GE was flooded with requests: winter carnivals and movie studios wanted artificial snow, other groups wanted clear skies for search and rescue operations. Then, in February 1947, all public discussion stopped abruptly. GE’s scientists were ordered to halt public outreach about cloud seeding and redirect their work to a classified U.S. military program called Project Cirrus.

Over the next five years, Project Cirrus ran more than 250 cloud seeding experiments, as the U.S. and other powers explored how to turn weather into a weapon. Schaefer was part of a team that dropped 80 pounds of dry ice into the center of Hurricane King, which had devastated Miami in 1947 before heading out to sea. After the seeding operation, the storm made a sudden sharp turn back toward land, slamming into the Georgia coast, killing one person and causing millions of dollars in damage. In 1963, Fidel Castro publicly accused the U.S. of seeding Hurricane Flora, which lingered over Cuba for four days and killed thousands of people. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military used cloud seeding to soften the ground along enemy supply routes, turning dirt roads into mud impassable for troops and convoys.

A few years after the Vietnam War ended, more than 30 countries including the U.S. and the USSR signed the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, banning weather warfare. By that point, mainstream interest in cloud seeding was already fading, first among militaries, then in civilian research. “We simply didn’t have the tools—advanced numerical models, precise observations—to prove that cloud seeding actually worked,” explains Katja Friedrich, a cloud physics researcher at the University of Colorado. That didn’t stop the USSR from seeding clouds near the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in 1986, to force radioactive precipitation to fall over unpopulated parts of Belarus instead of Moscow.

To make cloud seeding scientifically credible, researchers needed a far better understanding of precipitation across every scale, from the microphysics of nucleation to global atmospheric circulation. Back then, scientists couldn’t do the three core things needed to make the technology viable: identify pockets of supercooled liquid water in clouds, deliver seeding material accurately to those pockets, and prove that seeding actually caused the resulting precipitation. How do you know a cloud rained because of seeding, or if it would have rained anyway?

That changed by 2017, when U.S. researchers armed with powerful new computers running cutting-edge simulation software launched the Snowie project to finally answer that question. Like the GE team decades earlier, they dropped silver iodide from planes over the Rocky Mountains, where winter winds reliably push moisture up the slopes to form clouds at consistent times every day. The results were striking: seeding added an extra 100 to 300 acre-feet of snow per seeded storm. The most compelling evidence was visual: the plane sprayed a zigzag pattern of seeding material across the sky, aligned against the prevailing wind, and weather radar picked up a matching zigzag pattern of increased snowfall. “Mother Nature doesn’t create zigzag snow patterns,” one Snowie project scientist noted. It was the first time in nearly a century of cloud seeding research that anyone had documented the full chain of events, from seeding to precipitation reaching the ground.

Inside the UAE’s Rainmaking Ambition

The UAE’s national Center of Meteorology is a sleek glass cube rising out of flat desert scrub on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, ringed by dusty, busy highways. Inside, I meet Ahmad Al Kamali, the center’s rain operations manager. A sharp, fit young man with a neat beard and dark-rimmed glasses, Al Kamali studied at the UK’s University of Reading and worked as a forecaster before specializing in cloud seeding. Like all Emirati men I meet on the trip, he wears a traditional white kandura, with his headscarf held in place by a thick black cord.

We take the elevator up to the third floor, home to cloud seeding mission control. With gold trim and a marble floor, it feels more like a luxury hotel lobby than a government operations center—except for the giant radar map of the Persian Gulf that spans one entire wall. Forecasters, men in white traditional dress and women in black abayas, sit at rows of desks poring over satellite images and radar data, scanning for viable clouds to seed. Near the entrance, a small glass pyramid sits on a pedestal, about a foot wide at its base. It’s a holographic projector: when Al Kamali turns it on, a tiny animated cloud appears inside, a plane circles it, and rain begins to fall. It leaves me wondering how much of this is performance, not science.

The origins of the UAE’s program go back to the early 2000s, when the country was in the middle of a massive construction boom. Dubai and Abu Dhabi were packed with construction cranes, and the population had more than doubled in a decade as expats flocked to the country for its warm weather and low taxes. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family (now the UAE’s vice president and deputy prime minister, best known globally as the owner of Manchester City Football Club), argued that cloud seeding, paired with seawater desalination, could help replenish the country’s shrinking groundwater and refill its reservoirs. As the Emiratis built their program, they called in experts from another arid nation for guidance: South Africa.

Back in 1989, a team of South African researchers were studying how to boost raindrop formation. They were measuring cloud properties in the country’s east when they noticed something odd: one cumulus cloud was raining, while every other cloud in the area was completely dry. When they sent a plane into the cloud to collect samples, they found a far wider range of droplet sizes than in the dry clouds, with some drops up to half a centimeter across.

The discovery confirmed a key insight: it’s not just the number of droplets in a cloud that matters, it’s their size variation. If all droplets are the same size, they fall at the same speed and never collide and merge. But if you introduce larger droplets, they fall faster, collide with smaller droplets along the way, merge into even bigger drops, until they’re heavy enough to fall as rain. The South African team found that while clouds in semi-arid South Africa have hundreds of water droplets per cubic centimeter of air, they produce far less rain than oceanic clouds, which have just one-sixth as many droplets but far more variation in size.

So why did that one cloud have large droplets? They traced it to a nearby paper mill, whose chimney was spewing particulate debris that attracted water molecules. Over the next several years, the team ran long-term studies to figure out how to replicate this effect on demand. They landed on ordinary table salt, the most water-attracting (hygroscopic) material they could test. They then developed flares that release a steady stream of salt crystals when ignited.

Those early flares are the predecessor of the system the UAE uses today, manufactured locally at the Weather Modification Technology Factory. Al Kamali shows me two models: they’re foot-long tubes a couple of inches in diameter, each holding one kilogram of seeding material. One flare type is a mix of raw salts, called Ghaith 1. The other is salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium dioxide, designed to attract more water in dry desert climates, called Ghaith 2. Ghaith is one Arabic word for rain—unlike the near-synonym matar, which carries negative connotations of rain as punishment or catastrophic flood, ghaith means rain as mercy, rain that ends drought and brings prosperity.

A Flight Over Empty Skies

The morning after my visit to the Center of Meteorology, I take a taxi to Al Ain to join Newman on a cloud seeding flight. But there’s a problem: when I leave Abu Dhabi, a thick low fog covers the country, but by the time I reach Al Ain’s small regional airport, 100 miles inland from the coastal cities, the fog has burned off, leaving nothing but clear blue sky. There are no clouds to seed.

After clearing strict security and reaching the gold-painted hangar (the airport also hosts military training flights), I meet Newman, who offers to take me up anyway to demonstrate how a real mission works. He wears a blue cap embroidered with the UAE Rain Enhancement Program logo. Before moving to the UAE with his family 11 years ago, he worked as a commercial jet pilot, splitting his time between the UK and his native South Africa. He has the calm, reassuring presence you want from the pilot of a small prop plane you’re about to board.

Every cloud seeding mission starts with a forecast. A team of