In addition to stopping air travel and causing damage to streets and buildings, Dubai’s recent inundation of heavy rains raised concerns among the general public and climate experts about whether one of the hottest and driest cities in the world should be better equipped to withstand severe storms.
Authorities in the United Arab Emirates issued warnings to their citizens to stay indoors, as weather forecasters had predicted a significant storm would hit the country several days beforehand. However, this week’s flooding of streets, homes, and highways caused by one of the worst rainstorms in decades still completely shut down the country’s largest city, Dubai.
“Stormwater management systems were historically deemed an ‘unnecessary cost’ due to the limited rainfall” in the UAE, said Karim Elgendy, an associate fellow at the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House. “As the variability of rainfall increases across the region and as the likelihood of such events rises, the economic case for such systems becomes stronger.”
Human-caused climate change is making extreme weather events like heat and rain more intense, frequent and harder to predict. The Middle East is forecast to face higher temperatures and a decline in overall rainfall, according to long-term scientific projections. But these very arid places will also experience storms that drop unprecedented rain, according to researchers. That’s forcing governments to consider whether to adapt to rare but destructive events – and how.
Representatives for the UAE government didn’t immediately reply to a written request for comment.
“It’s a real tradeoff in thinking about the cost and the opportunity costs,” said Linda Shi, an assistant professor specializing in urban climate adaptation at Cornell University in the US. “These events are likely to be erratic and unpredictable.”
The UAE was battered on Tuesday by its heaviest downpour since records began in 1949. Scientists and weather forecasters attribute the storm to a large amount of moisture rising from warming seas to the atmosphere, before falling as rain over to the Arabian Peninsula.
El Nino, the climate phenomenon that makes seas warmer and alters weather patterns globally, may have affected the storm. Climate change can’t be ruled out as a factor, though more detailed studies are needed to establish its exact influence, several climatologists and forecasters told Bloomberg Green.
“While massive floods like this have occurred in the past, the huge scale and intensity of the rainfall that caused it are exactly what we are seeing more of in our warmer world,” said Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in the UK. “With so much rain falling all at once, even carefully designed drainage systems will struggle to cope.”
The floods drew immediate attention to the UAE’s cloud-seeding program, which involves injecting particles into clouds that can influence rainfall. But it will take “significant data analysis” to ascertain the role, if any, it played in making the rains more extreme, according to Auroop Ganguly, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “Often major floods in a city relate to urban drainage and related infrastructures,” he said.
The UAE as a whole and Dubai in particular were unprepared for so much water falling in such a short amount of time. Drainage systems soon proved incapable of holding back the floodwaters. Subterranean garages completely flooded, causing water to flow into homes, streets, and highways.
After the storm, tankers were sent out to pump water out of the streets, but days later, some towns, lakes, and neighborhood football fields were still flooded. The effects are still spreading. On Thursday night, shelves in a few local supermarkets remained empty. Government workers were asked to work from home whenever feasible during the four days that schools were closed. The international airport in Dubai announced on Friday afternoon that it was restricting the number of inbound flights for the next 48 hours but permitting departures to continue.
“Cities in arid regions may be especially ill-prepared for heavy rain events because buildings, landscapes and infrastructure have not been designed with drainage capacity as a primary concern,” said Zachary Lamb, an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley in the US. “Climate change is unsettling long-held assumptions about landscape and climate conditions that have informed the design and planning of buildings and cities for generations.”
Dubai is not alone in facing that problem. Last year, a superstorm burst dams in Libya, causing floods that wreaked havoc in the city of Derna and killed at least 5,000 people. Parts of Beijing were also submerged last year after the Chinese capital was battered by the heaviest rainfall in 140 years of weather records. The flooding washed away homes and caused dozens of fatalities.
“Dubai can only prepare for what it sees as being within the range of probability for the future,” said Lisa Dale, a climate adaptation specialist at Columbia University in the US. “Predictions for future weather patterns foundationally rely on past weather patterns, leaving many governments unprepared for climate change impacts that are not historically common.”
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