Amit Katwala
In the skies over Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE.
A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small droplets that will collide and coalesce with other droplets until they grow big enough for gravity to pull them out of the sky as rain.
This is cloud seeding. It’s one of hundreds of missions that Newman and his fellow pilots will fly this year as part of the UAE’s ambitious, decade-long attempt to increase rainfall in its desert lands. Sitting next to him in the copilot’s seat, I can see red earth stretching to the horizon. The only water in sight is the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, perched on the side of a mountain below a sheikh’s palace, shimmering like a jewel.
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