Unusual scenes were witnessed in the Arabian Gulf region recently, as a result of the floods and storms that swept across large areas of the Emirates and Oman, due to the floods of the “Al Hadir” and “Al Mutair” depressions, which flooded roads and valleys, and led to disruptions in air traffic, work, and study.
Emirates described what happened as “an exceptional event recorded in its climatic history”, and the amounts of rain that fell were the largest in more than 7 decades, according to the official page of the UAE National Center of Meteorology.
As for Oman, the effects extended to include the death of more than 20 people, after water trapped many people inside their vehicles.
Despite the warnings issued by weather experts before the recent extreme wave occurred, what happened raised questions about the world's ability to predict the magnitude of the effects of various weather phenomena, and not just expect them to occur, coinciding with the worsening phenomenon of global warming.
Hurricanes, not depressions
In his talk with “Green in Arabic”, “Dr. Ahmed Al-Malaaba”, director of the environmental studies center at the Hashemite University in Jordan, said that the weather models did not accurately predict what happened in the Arabian Gulf region, describing what happened as “hurricanes,” not depressions because the wind speed exceeded 115 km per hour.
In their weather or climate forecasts, scientists rely on models that include computer programs that analyze a large amount of data and equations to predict what will happen over periods ranging from a few hours to hundreds of years.
UAE Floods- Reuters
Imperfect accuracy
“Al-Malaaba” believes that not all climate phenomena can be predicted with the same degree of accuracy, because we cannot provide these models with highly accurate data, in light of what he called the “greenhouse gas conflict” in the world.
According to the Jordanian expert's opinion, this was also repeated during Hurricane “Daniel”, which swept through Libya, and Hurricane “Elias”, which struck Greece last year, describing what is currently happening in the world, including the Arab world, as "climate chaos."
“AL-Malaaba” suggested increasing the number of satellites directed for climate purposes, increasing the number of climate crisis centers, and providing highly advanced technologies so that data inputs are sufficient and their accuracy increases, even if they do not reach 100%.
He also referred to the Malaysian experience in dealing with the floods that were sweeping the capital, Kuala Lumpur, with the number of victims reaching 100,000 people annually. The authorities used huge drilling machines to build a tunnel between two rivers to collect water, so that human losses decreased.
He added that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia uses such technologies in the Emirate of Mecca, which can be used in normal times to alleviate the car congestion crisis.
False waves
But there is another aspect of the matter, which is the errors that weather models may make, warning us of an imaginary danger that will not occur, but which is enough to turn the lives of those exposed to it upside down.
A few days before the floods that swept the Arabian Gulf, South African residents who used a meteorological application were surprised by the appearance of strong waves reaching a height of approximately 25 meters near the coast of their country.
The waves, which extends over an area of 2,000 miles, as the size of the US state of Texas, appeared on the application for a whole 24 hours, before it turned out to be just an error in the data it relied on.
The official statement of the application belonging to a Czech company blamed the error in the data it obtained from the German Meteorological Service (DWD), which later corrected the error, but after a state of panic prevailed on social media.
This was not the only mistake witnessed this year. In February 2024, the authorities of the American city of Boston announced the temporary closure of schools to avoid expected snow, but on the contrary, everyone was surprised by calm weather.
Speaking to “Green in Arabic”, “Richard Allan”, professor of climate science at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, points out that although the accuracy of weather forecasts has increased over time, the complex and chaotic nature of the atmosphere will keep these forecasts less than ideal.
He continues emphatically: “We need to continually evaluate these models, work to improve them, and make users aware of how good the source they are relying on is.”
The professor of climate science believes that improving monitoring processes and simulation systems on which forecasts depend is likely to contribute to reducing errors that may increase in conjunction with the change in weather we are experiencing in the future.
Regarding forecasting weather changes in the long term, “Alan” points out that despite the prevailing uncertainty about how the climate will change as a result of continued emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and continued deforestation; These models provide “acceptable” paths into the future, allowing adaptation to changes in weather characteristics.
The professor of climate sciences also added that the advantage of using artificial intelligence is the extreme speed in providing us with forecasts, compared to traditional model systems, but it requires training on huge amounts of data produced by these systems based on physics.
