When the rains come

Visiting Dubai is not on my bucket list. 

Too hot. Too politically repressive. Sure, women can vote and drive, but...You can go to jail for throwing an F-bomb. (WTF?) I believe that poppyseed bagels are outlawed. There's the weird indoor skiing thing. And what's with those artificial, palmtree-shaped islands in the harbor? 

So, I was never going to go to Dubai anyway.

Still, I occasionally cast an eye on what up in the Emirates, and was, thus, fascinated by the recent floods there. Talk about what up. 

We're used to flooding stories in the news in the US, in the news locally. Just last summer there were dire floods in Vermont, and in Leominster in Central Massachusetts. When we have major storms, especially in the winter, spots along the shore are frequently flooded. Waterfront Boston gets flooded, too.

But Dubai is in the desert.

Yes, I know that it does rain in the desert. After all, my sister Kath spends half the year in Tucson. (Just not the months when they get torrential rains.) But this rain in Dubai, well, was of stunningly biblical proportions. Seeing all those snorkeling cars, all those highways turned to rivers. Just plain weird. 

While meteorologists had, a few days earlier, predicted the heavy rains, and they do get some crazy storms, the magnitude was somewhat unusual. 

On average, the Arabian Peninsula receives a scant few of inches of rain a year, although scientists have found that a sizable chunk of that precipitation falls in infrequent but severe bursts, not as periodic showers.

U.A.E. officials said the 24-hour rain total on Tuesday was the country’s largest since records there began in 1949. But parts of the nation had experienced an earlier round of thunderstorms just last month. (Source: NY Times)

So why now?

Initial speculation was the cloud seeding - goosing the atmosphere to get a bit of rain to increase the water supply - had run amok. But that was quickly discounted. (Sort of discounted. But, anyway, seeding is not likely to have caused the big kahuna of a storm Dubai experienced last week.)

Then there's global warming, which is a maybe yes/maybe not so fast proposition:

In their latest assessment of climate research, scientists convened by the United Nations found there wasn’t enough data to have firm conclusions about rainfall trends in the Arabian Peninsula and how climate change was affecting them. The researchers said, however, that if global warming were to be allowed to continue worsening in the coming decades, extreme downpours in the region would quite likely become more intense and more frequent.

Then there's the fact that even though modern Dubai is a relatively recently designed and manufactured city, it wasn't built for floods. 

Cities in arid regions often aren’t designed to drain very effectively. In these areas, paved surfaces block rain from seeping into the earth below, forcing it into drainage systems that can easily become overwhelmed.

I'm about 100% unlikely to ever experience flooding in Dubai.

Still sort of fascinating to know that if I were planning a visit, I might want pack as if I were going to Venice in the rainy season, bringing along a raincoat that actually repels water (not all do) and a pair of rubber boots.

Who knew?