Dubai International Airport was closed for a short period Tuesday and a number of flights were cancelled as numerous jets on the ground looked more like puddle jumpers plying the choppy waters of the tarmac.
The UAE’s National Center of Meteorology said a historic storm dropped more rainfall than the area has seen in at least the past 75 years, with parts of the city of Al Ain south of Dubai receiving over 25 cm (10 inches) of rain in less than 24 hours. By some accounts that’s over twice the amount of rain typically received there in an entire year. Exactly how long it’s been since this much rain has fallen in this part of the desert is likely impossible to know since data collection only began in 1949.
The event lines up with two worrying and seemingly contradictory trends. Like many other arid countries, the UAE is seeing a long-term decline in annual rainfall so far this century. A 2022 report showed a decline in annual rainfall since 2003 compared to the long-term mean. At the same time, extreme weather anomalies like this week’s flooding are on the rise in the region and around the world, it seems. Similar downpours (although not quite as wet) made news in the UAE in 2016 and 2022.
In fact, a whole new sub-field of “attribution” science has emerged in the past decade to not just chronicle such unusual and extreme weather events, but to determine how much they can be attributed to the effects of climate change. It will be some time before judgment is rendered on these epic rains.
The unscientific term that seems nonetheless more accurate to me for events like these has long been “global weirding,” apparently coined by Hunter Lovins back when the phrase “global warming” was more commonly used than climate change.
We now know worldwide warming is not the entirety of our worries; it is indeed the weirding of the weather that comes with it. One season it might take the form of a hurricane parking itself over Houston, another it might be record heat and fires in British Columbia, then running that last one back two years in a row to be meta-weird.
Over a year’s worth of rain in a single day in one of the driest regions on Earth amounts to the planet’s climate staying on trend another day.
Rain is expected to continue in the area but will taper off over the coming hours and days.
