NASA’s Landsat 9 satellite captures before and after pics of Dubai floods from space
Dubai flood: One of the pictures taken by NASA satellite shows flooding in Jabel Ali, while another shows flooded areas in Abu Dhabi, the capital of UAE.
NASA recently shared striking before and after images of Dubai’s recent floods, caused by torrential rainfall that hit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last week. The rainfall, which amounted to over a year and a half’s worth of rain in just one day, brought the desert city to a standstill. It also triggered flash floods across eastern regions, disrupting transportation and inundating roads.
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Captured by NASA’s Landsat 9 satellite on April 19, these images depict vast pools of floodwater contrasting sharply with the region’s typically dry terrain. The deep blue hues in the images, highlighted in false colour to emphasise the presence of water, reveal the extent of the flooding.
One of the pictures shows flooding in Jabel Ali, a town 35 kilometres (22 miles) southwest of Dubai.
Another picture taken from space shows flooded areas in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of UAE, including Sheikh Zayed Road, a crucial thoroughfare that runs through Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Residential areas like Khalifa City and Zayed City also bear the brunt of the storms, with visible patches of water.
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Experts, including Friederike Otto from Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, have linked the unprecedented rainfall to climate change. Otto said, “When we talk of heavy rainfall, we need to talk of climate change. Focusing on cloud seeding is misleading.”
She added, “Cloud seeding cannot create clouds from nothing that encourages water...already in the atmosphere to condense faster and drop water in certain places...first, you do need moisture. Without it, there would be no clouds. Even if cloud seeding did encourage clouds around Dubai to drop water, the atmosphere would have likely been carrying more water to form clouds in the first place because of human-induced climate change.”
“If humans continue to burn oil, gas, and coal, the climate will continue to warm, rainfall will continue to get heavy, and people will continue to lose their lives in floods,” Otto warned.
