Saudi Arabia Buys 5 Aeroplanes for Cloud Seeding
Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Center for Meteorology (NCM) Eng. Abdulrahman Al-Fadhli signed an agreement on Thursday to buy five aircraft for the Regional Cloud Seeding Program; four are dedicated to cloud seeding and the specially-equipped fifth plane is allocated for weather and climate research and studies. These aircraft are the newest of their kind and equipped with all the necessary technologies.
Al-Fadhli stressed that the project for purchasing cloud-seeding aircraft aims to build domestic capacity, transfer localised knowledge, ensure business sustainability, raise the level of coverage and efficiency of cloud seeding, as well as reduce the accompanying costs of operating aircraft by providing private aircraft equipped with cloud seeding capabilities and techniques.
For his part, the CEO of NCM, Dr. Ayman Ghulam, noted that the program has completed its third phase and is preparing to launch the fourth, pointing out that the program’s operational results exceeded a success rate of 97%.
Ghulam added that during the first three stages, the program completed 626.67 hours of flight through 190 cloud-seeding missions, using 3,405 burners on the target areas.
