UAE Denies Rumors That Cloud Seeding Caused Record-Breaking Flooding [Video]

The United Arab Emirates was hit with historic flooding on Tuesday after roughly a year’s worth of rain fell in just a single day. The record rainfall, more than four inches at the Dubai airport and 10 inches elsewhere in the country, caused some people online to speculate it was all caused by cloud seeding. But the UAE’s National Center of Meteorology released a statement to CNBC on Wednesday denying the claims.

As the Washington Post points out, meteorological models predicted heavy rain in the UAE a week earlier, and officials in the country denied contributing to excess rain for precisely that reason.

“We take the safety of our people, pilots, and aircrafts very seriously. The NCM does not conduct cloud seeding operations during extreme weather events,” the deputy director general of the National Center of Meteorology told CNBC.

The UAE first started cloud seeding in the 1990s, a process that involves aircraft releasing silver iodide into clouds in …