Saudi Arabia is readying an expansion of its cloud-seeding program, a controversial effort to boost rainfall over its parched territory, the country’s deputy environment minister said in an interview.
Riyadh has assembled a team of domestic and international researchers and learned vast amounts from its early efforts at cloud-seeding, Osama Ibrahim Faqeeha said, speaking in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and Climate Week. The country now aims to roll it out elsewhere within its borders and to lead broader regional research into the practice.
“We are a hyper arid country,” Faqeeha said. “We have to try everything possible.”
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Saudi Arabia began its earliest efforts at cloud seeding in the early 2000s, but “that was not successful,” Faqeeha acknowledged. Recent developments in artificial intelligence, meteorology, and remote sensing had helped the kingdom revamp the program, however.
Researchers now better understand the relatively narrow window in which cloud-seeding must occur, the varying types of clouds that are best suited to the practice, and the ultimate payoff that results from the effort.
“You cannot rely on chance that it will succeed,” Faqeeha said. “It’s not about shooting in the dark.”
The practice involves introducing substances into clouds in order to induce them to lower their temperature below zero Celsius, thereby forming ice droplets, and ultimately driving the production of rain in clouds that typically would otherwise have none. Faced with rising global temperatures as a result of climate change, a growing number of places, including the United States, are experimenting with cloud seeding.
The process is, however, hugely controversial, with critics arguing that the consequences of such programs on the planet’s ecosystem and climate are insufficiently understood.
For Saudi Arabia, the effort aims to increase the country’s low stocks of water and combat desertification. Riyadh in December will host the COP16 summit on combating desertification, and part of Faqeeha’s agenda in New York was geared towards preparation for the talks and raising awareness of the growing threat of land degradation globally.