Here's why experts don't think cloud seeding played a role in Dubai's downpour

With cloud seeding, it may rain, but it doesn't really pour or flood — at least nothing like what drenched the United Arab Emirates and paralyzed Dubai, meteorologists said.

Cloud seeding, although decades old, is still controversial in the weather community, mostly because it has been hard to prove that it does very much. No one reports the type of flooding that on Tuesday doused the UAE, which often deploys the technology in an attempt to squeeze every drop of moisture from a sky that usually gives less than 4 or 5 inches (10 to 13 centimeters) of rain a year.

“It's most certainly not cloud seeding,” said private meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If that occurred with cloud seeding, they'd have water all the time. You can't create rain out of thin air per se and get 6 inches of water. That's akin to perpetual motion technology.”

Meteorologists and climate scientists said the extreme rainfall is akin to what the world expects with human-caused climate change, and one way to know for certain that it was not caused by tinkering with clouds is that it was forecast days in advance. Atmospheric science researcher Tomer Burg pointed to computer models that six days earlier forecast several inches of rain — the typical amount for an entire year in the UAE.