A video lasting just over a minute has gone viral on social media, showing what many users believe to be images of recent floods and extreme events in Dubai. However, some clips contained in the footage do not correspond to the weather events that occurred on April 16 in the United Arab Emirates. In particular, the sequence of a tornado is the result of digital manipulation.
For those in a hurry:
- Some social media accounts, promoting theories linking the cloudseeding technique to the recent floods in Dubai, have shared a viral video containing several catastrophic clips relating to the events of April 16.
- Although heavy rainfall caused significant flooding and disruption, numerous scenes in the video are not attributable to the events in Dubai.
- The sequence showing a huge tornado is not real, but was generated with computer graphics (CGI) software.
- The only authentic images are of flooding in the streets, in the subway and at Dubai airport.
Analyses
Here is one of the publications of the video:
A 66-second video montage would show the dramatic effects of the weather event that hit Dubai on April 16. The footage has been shared by numerous users on social media, who point to cloud seeding as a possible cause of the floods. The video, made up of 13 short clips, was analyzed through reverse image search, allowing individual frames to be examined and the original sources identified.
The video of 2023
The opening sequence of the video, lasting 3 seconds, is featured in a YouTube video uploaded on November 4, 2023. It concerns events preceding the floods in the United Arab Emirates and attributed to Bahrain. Compared to the Dubai video, the sequence is simply flipped horizontally.
The video of 2022
Similarly, the sequence between the tenth and fourteenth second of the video, which shows lightning striking the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the tallest Dubai skyscraper in the world, was published on Facebook on January 3, 2022, and therefore not may be related to the events of April 16.
The Brazilian video of 2023
The next clip, in which we see a tree felled by the force of the wind, was instead taken from an article by G1a news portal reporting a strong storm that occurred on April 1, 2023 in Bicas, a municipality in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
The recycled video
Other images out of context are those we see from seconds 30 to 36, taken from a video published on TikTok by the user “disaster349”, attributed to a tornado in Florida and not in Dubai.
The digitally created tornado
Finally, the spectacular sequence of the tornado, present from seconds 37 to 42 of the video, was published on TikTok on October 7, 2023 by “rtsarovvideo”, a channel specialized in the creation of surreal videos created with Computer Graphics (CGI) software, such as you can easily check it from the account description and other similar content on the account. Therefore, the video is clearly manipulated and has nothing to do with the weather events in Dubai.
Conclusions
The viral video circulating on social media regarding extreme weather events in Dubai is made up of a series of clips. A detailed analysis of the stills revealed that much of the editing is out of context, with videos released on dates earlier than the events of April 16. Furthermore, the tornado sequence is a fake generated via computer graphics software. The only authentic images are of flooding in the streets, in the subway and at Dubai airport.
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Tags: Fake context videos extreme weather events Dubai
