When the UAE experienced severe floods two years ago, many questioned the country’s practice of so-called cloud seeding—the dispersion of certain chemicals in the air to basically squeeze more rain from clouds—as a possible cause of the floods. Officially, that explanation was rejected, yet cloud-seeding is not an unproblematic practice—and it is being employed more and more.
Middle Eastern countries where rainfall is scarce are among those that have been seeding clouds for the longest time, but they are not the only ones. France, India, Russia, the United States, and China have all experimented with cloud seeding. In fact, China has the largest weather modification program in the world, CNBC noted in a recent report about the weather-changing practice, attributing this growth in interest in cloud seeding to climate change.
The practice is pretty straightforward. Cloud seeding involves sending an aircraft to disperse either sodium chloride—for hotter places like the Middle East—or silver iodide—for colder parts of the world—particles in the air. The particles then turn into condensation nuclei, and ice crystals form around them and then fall to the ground as either rain or snow. Estimates suggest cloud seeding could increase rainfall by as much as 30-35% in dry places and by between 10% and 15% in more humid parts of the world.
According to CNBC, interest in the practice is on the rise, citing the owner of one cloud-seeding company as attributing this rising interest to two factors. “One is truly just circumstance, a lot of these countries and regions are suffering from more volatility in climate and precipitation patterns and their water supply, and so it’s leading them through necessity to be more creative than they were in the past,” Augustus Doricko told the publication.
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The other reason, which, according to Doricko, is the more important one, is the recent progress made in “how to do measurements and attribution of cloud seeding effects.” In other words, now there is technology that can measure the effectiveness of cloud seeding more accurately—and more quickly.
A third reason for what appears to be the growing popularity of cloud seeding, the report notes, is water stress. Droughts are being reported as becoming increasingly frequent, even in parts of the world that are not known for their dry climate, and warnings are being issued about dwindling water resources.
Europe is a case in point for the latter, with reports emerging a couple of years ago about the continent’s shrinking water reserves amid growing demand, which is to date eight times higher than it was a century ago. A Bloomberg report from August 2025 pointed to an extended summer drought in Bulgaria that should serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of Europe and a taste of what is coming.
When it comes to the weather and natural resources, it is often difficult to distinguish between reasonable concern and alarmism. Bulgaria, for instance, just had one of its wettest winters in the last five years, suggesting next summer may not be as droughty as the summer of 2025. On a broader scale, the Northern Hemisphere had one of its snowiest winters in a decade, despite multiple warnings that snow is a thing of the past for Europe and parts of the U.S. because of climate change.
Cloud seeding has a long enough history to suggest it is a viable way to increase rainfall. However, there are doubts about the extent of its effectiveness, per the CNBC report, which cited the head of the Environmental and Geophysical Sciences lab at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, Diana Francis, as describing the effectiveness of the technique as “modest”. Possible unintended consequences may also be worth looking into, now that more accurate measuring technology is available. It is always a good idea to have several options to deal with a potential problem rather than fixating on just one potential solution.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com