Did the war disrupt weather modification on Iran?

Speculations about post-war rainfall

In November 2025, Iran’s president Pezeshkian announced that Tehran could no longer remain the capital of Iran: drought would soon make the city of 10 million people unlivable. Scientific American diagnosed Tehran’s plight as “a perfect storm of climate change and corruption”, citing Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute.

Six months later, Tehran was experiencing record rainfall and snow, and dams were overflowing in other parts of the country. The Iranian Embassy in Bulgaria posted a video of one such dam, at Paveh.

You can’t predict the weather. But “climate change and corruption” presumably didn’t change in six months. If the rain keeps up, what did change?

This note reviews some of the scientific literature on weather modification, with specific reference to well-funded weather modification programs based in the United Arab Emirates, which were damaged in Iran’s retaliatory strikes during the Ramadan war. The notion that the US military induced drought over Iran and/or Iraq is speculative; the notion that the US and UAE are engaged in active weather modification in Iran’s environs is established fact.

1. Cloud seeding

The focus of the UAE weather modification program is cloud seeding. Simply explained, cloud seeding involves aircraft spraying materials (usually silver or potassium iodide) into clouds around which water vapor will condense, growing clouds and inducing precipitation. The US military weaponized cloud seeding over Vietnam between 1967 and 1972, which they called Operation Popeye, to try to disrupt North Vietnamese logistics by extending the monsoon. Another US military weather modification project was called STORMFURY (not Epic Fury or Epstein Fury), and involved the manipulation of hurricanes (Willoughby et al. 1985).

From Department of Defense 1974, SEASIA Rainmaking. Retrieved from the soon-to-be-defunct Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20090612231729/http://www.sunshine-project.org/enmod/popeye

The UAE program is not limited to chemical interventions. In 2021, they tried what the BBC called “cloud-busting drones”. The drones delivered electric charge to clouds to attempt to aid condensation.

Evaluations of the UAE’s extensive cloud seeding program indicate success in enhancing rainfall (Hosari et al. 2021, Wehbe et al. 2023), and the physics of cloud seeding continues to advance, including in and around the UAE. Saudi Arabia reported a successful cloud seeding in 2025 (Alzahrani and Abdelbaki 2025).

2. Ground-based weather modification

German scientists have experimented with using lasers to create clouds - in lab conditions, but lasers aren’t the only option for ground-based weather modification. A 2009 paper by Beare et al., “Accounting for spatiotemporal variation of rainfall measurements when evaluating ground-based methods of weather modification” described a study in Australia of a system called Atlant, a ground-based ionization technology for affecting rainfall. The system’s functioning is described as follows:

“1. Initially, negative ions are generated from a high-voltage corona discharge wire array; the ions become attached to particles in the atmosphere which later act as cloud condensation nuclei; the ions are conveyed to the higher atmosphere by wind; the electric charges on these particles are transferred to cloud droplets; and the electrostatic forces on droplet interaction aid the coalescence of the cloud droplets, resulting in enhanced raindrop growth rate and ultimately increasing rainfall downwind from the Atlant ion emitter.”

Ground-based manipulation of the ionosphere through the emission of radiated power is the science of the US military’s HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program). Emitters can add considerable energy to targeted areas of atmosphere. Ground-based ion emitters were used for cloud seeding in Oman in 2013 and 2014 in a trial reported in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences (Chambers et al. 2016).

3. Iran’s complaints

Iraqi scholar Salam Abdulqadir Abdulrahman (2024) described cloud seeding as “problematic” because of the transnational nature of clouds and disputes over water:

“Similar to water basins, there are cloud basins or cloud lines, shared by states.

“A cloud basin starts from where the clouds form and begin their journey and all the areas they travel over to where they disperse completely. For example, the northern areas of the Middle East, except for the northern part of Turkey, share a basin. Their clouds are largely formed over the Mediterranean Sea and move eastward. They travel over Israel and Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, south of Turkey, northern Iran and some other areas. It is believed that seeding clouds in one state, the upwind, reduces the amount of rain in another state, the one downwind; i.e. part of the rain of a downwind state is seized by an upwind state. The shift of rain causes security concerns for downwind states.”

Iran thus complained in 2018: “Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, head of Iran’s Civil Defence Organisation, accused Israel in a press conference in 2018 of manipulating weather and making the clouds unable to rain over Iran. He alleged that Israel had stolen Iran’s snow.”

4. Rainfall in 2026

Two mechanisms are suggested for how a drought over Iran could be engineered through UAE-based weather modification.

1. First, cloud seeding over UAE could indeed have deprived Iran of rainfall in proportion to the extra rainfall received by UAE.

2. Second, if ground-based ionization can be used to encourage condensation, a similar process could be used to discourage condensation and prevent the formation of clouds.

One Iranian poster (@AcEpic69, April 15/26) speculated that THAAD radar arrays could be used to disrupt the formation of clouds over Iran. Another poster (@raminrnp, April 22/26) believes that weaponized weather modification against Iran will continue from other bases (Qatar, Bahrain), drones, HAARP emitters in the northern hemisphere, and more.

In this fourth section we have left the scientific literature and headed on to twitter. The evidentiary standard is lowered. Correlation is not causation. But the radars are destroyed, the UAE’s cloud seeding program is disrupted, and it’s raining in Iran again.