Did cloud seeding cause Texas floods? Misinformation spreads as severe flooding strikes US
As the devastation spreads, so have baseless claims: Thousands of social media users have shared conspiracy theories blaming the floods on cloud seeding — a weather-modification practice that experts say is not only unrelated to recent storms but is rarely used in emergencies, especially in the humid, storm-prone South.
Even a congressional candidate has alleged that humans manipulated the weather behind the Fourth of July weekend floods in Texas, which left at least 120 people dead and more than 170 still missing.
Kandiss Taylor, who is running for Georgia's District 1 seat in the U.S. House, posted on X early Saturday — just one day after flash flooding in the Texas Hill Country swept away 27 girls from the riverside Camp Mystic, and as rising waters in the Austin area killed at least 16 more with 12 missing.
'Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake.' In another post that day she wrote: 'This isn't just 'climate change.' It's cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation,' she added. '"Fake weather causes real tragedy, that's murder. Pray. Prepare. Question the narrative.'
But experts say cloud seeding is not to blame for the recent floods across the United States. Instead, the widespread flooding was driven by a convergence of moisture from two tropical systems lingering in the atmosphere.
Just days earlier, Tropical Storm Barry made landfall on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, while another system stalled over the Gulf, pumping deep tropical moisture into the southern U.S. That moisture fueled the catastrophic floods in Texas Hill Country, where the Guadalupe River surged 30 feet in less than an hour early Friday.
Still, as misinformation runs rampant on TikTok and other platforms, meteorologists and climate experts have been quick to debunk false claims.
Cloud seeding is a form of weather modification first developed in the 1940s to help boost rainfall or snowfall in drought-prone or arid regions. The process involves injecting a small amount of a chemical — typically silver iodide — into an existing cloud to encourage the formation of larger water droplets or ice crystals, according to ABC13 meteorologist Travis Herzog.
Most clouds don't naturally produce rain or snow because the droplets or crystals inside them are too small to fall. But silver iodide acts as a large 'cloud condensation nucleus,' helping water vapor clump together into heavier droplets or crystals that gravity can pull down to the ground, Herzog explained in a Facebook post.
It is not allowed on storms that could produce severe weather, tornadoes or flash floods, Herzog wrote.
There are both federal regulations and state regulations for cloud seeding and other forms of weather modification.
A cloud seeding project took place in Pleasanton, about 150 miles southeast of Kerr County, on July 2, according to reports from Rainmaker, one of the weather modification companies in the U.S. But experts emphasize that the cloud seeding did not trigger the severe weather and sought to bring modest rainfall to the area, which has experienced persistent drought conditions for several years.
Once a cloud is seeded, it releases its moisture quickly and does not continue producing rain beyond that initial burst, according to meteorologists.
There have been several rounds of rainmaking efforts in South Texas since March, according to data from Rainmaker.
"Even though cloud seeding was not responsible for the Hill Country floods, I know there are moral and ethical concerns when it comes to modifying the weather (or any natural Earth system), however small those modifications may be," Herzog wrote, adding, "and the topic is worth more public discourse and scrutiny."
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: What is cloud seeding? Theories spread as major floods strike US
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