Kentucky floods falsely attributed to cloud seeding

"Kentucky flooding, Amazon, Southwest airlines, and Wilhelm Reich Cloudbusters. Seems there is a connection," says a February 17, 2025 X post from Matt Roeske, a supplement seller who AFP has previously fact-checked.

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Screenshot from X taken February 18, 2025

The post -- which evoked the name of an Austrian who claimed to have invented a device to manipulate clouds -- garnered thousands of interactions. The same video has circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Rumble and Gettr.

At least 14 people have died in Kentucky as powerful storms continue to pound the eastern United States, including in West Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency on February 14 and deployed National Guard units to disaster areas following flooding and powerful winds (archived here and here).

Amid bitterly-cold temperatures and with snow now impacting the area, tens of thousands of residents are without electricity.

Cloud computing, not seeding

In his video, Roeske claims that Southwest Airlines and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com, entered into a partnership to develop "cloud seeding" technology, a weather modification method designed to increase precipitation in rain-depleted regions. He says Southwest Airlines flies routes over the flood zones and implies their planes dispersed chemicals that may have contributed to the storms.

Cloud seeding experiments started in the United States in the 1940s to increase rainfall in dry areas by dispersing substances like silver iodide into the atmosphere. While there is some evidence it can have limited effects on precipitation, there is little to indicate it can influence larger storms (archived here).

Conspiracy theories about cloud seeding and human weather modification routinely crop up after major hurricanes and flood events, falsely asserting that the technique can generate large cyclones and change weather patterns. In January, Kentucky state lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it a felony to engage in cloud seeding or weather modification, including by federal agencies (archived here).

When discussing Southwest's supposed weather modification deal, Roeske cites an artificial intelligence overview Google generated when he searched "southwest airlines cloudseeding," claiming the airline paid AWS $1.7 billion for the "cloud migration" technology. However, a keyword search revealed that the agreement was not related to cloud seeding or weather modification but cloud computing.

In 2023, Southwest announced it would spend $1.7 billion on technology improvements (archived here) after an operations "meltdown" had left thousands of customers stranded during the previous year's holiday season. The company had also already contracted AWS as its "preferred cloud provider" to update some of its digital infrastructure (archived here).

Google's artificial intelligence has been criticized for occasionally generating misleading responses and promoting misinformation.

AFP contacted Southwest Airlines for comment, but no response was forthcoming.

'Very small' potential effect

Jerald Brotzge, the director of the Kentucky Climate Center (archived here), said there is no evidence that the storms over Kentucky resulted from human actions and that the state commonly sees flooding rains in late winter.

"During the warm season, evaporation is much stronger and green vegetation and forests are taking in a lot of water from the soil, thereby reducing runoff. During the winter, evaporation and soil uptake by vegetation is minimal, leaving much more water to run off into streams and rivers," he said in a February 18 email.

Brotzge said cloud seeding experiments have focused on the western and central United States, not the eastern regions that generally see heavier rainfall (archived here). He also said cloud seeding and other modification methods could not influence weather patterns enough to trigger storms like those in Kentucky.

"While weather modification (in theory) could enhance precipitation amounts in a high-liquid water content environment (as we had during the flooding event), the additional increase due to weather modification would be very small," he said.

Dorian Burnette, an associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Memphis (archived here), said the National Weather Service predicted the storms that would form over Kentucky around February 11, days before they would bring flooding rains to the region. He also said while there is no indication of whether modification techniques led to the floods, human-driven climate change may have contributed to their intensity.

"We have observed an increase in the number of extreme precipitation events in recent decades, and this event is consistent with that trend," he said in a February 18 email while qualifying that further study was necessary to determine if and how much anthropogenic climate change influenced the storms.

AFP has debunked additional false claims about weather manipulation.