Saudi Arabia is readying an expansion of its cloud-seeding program, a controversial effort to boost rainfall over its parched territory, the country’s deputy environment minister said in an interview.

Riyadh has assembled a team of domestic and international researchers and learned vast amounts from its early efforts at cloud-seeding, Osama Ibrahim Faqeeha said, speaking in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and Climate Week. The country now aims to roll it out elsewhere within its borders and to lead broader regional research into the practice.

“We are a hyper arid country,” Faqeeha said. “We have to try everything possible.” Saudi Arabia began its earliest efforts at cloud seeding in the early 2000s, but “that was not successful,” Faqeeha acknowledged. Recent developments in artificial intelligence, meteorology, and remote sensing had helped the kingdom revamp the program, however.

Researchers now better understand the relatively narrow window in which cloud-seeding must occur, the varying types of clouds that are best suited to the practice, and the ultimate payoff that results from the effort.

“You cannot rely on chance that it will succeed,” Faqeeha said. “It’s not about shooting in the dark.”

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