“If they wanted to stop the fires they would make it rain.”
Cloud seeding can cause rain, but not somewhere as dry as Los Angeles right now
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You can’t make it rain without clouds; the Los Angeles area is too dry to effectively cause rainfall there to help stop the wildfires, experts say.
Weather modification has been baselessly blamed for extreme weather events in the United States. Now, some social media users are wondering why it’s not being used to fight the deadly wildfires in the Los Angeles area.
“If they wanted to stop the fires they would make it rain,” a Jan. 12 Threads post said.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)
Weather modification programs are real, and the most common one is cloud seeding, which is a technique to increase rainfall or snow in drought-stricken regions by shooting silver iodide into clouds.
Rain would “definitely help” stop the wildfires, said Katja Friedrich, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, “but I am not sure where the rain should come from. There is nothing in the forecast and it is too dry to cloud seed.”
Before the wildfires started in California, the Los Angeles area endured eight months of negligible rainfall, the Los Angeles Times reported.
More recent news reports weren’t promising for people craving a wetter forecast.
“LA faces high winds and no sign of rain after week of flames,” a Jan. 14 Bloomberg News headline said.
Cloud seeding requires “either water vapor that can condense or cloud droplets in clouds (that are too light to fall down),” Friedrich wrote to PolitiFact in an email. “The LA area is currently so dry that there is not enough water that you could condense.”
Auroop Ganguly, director of artificial intelligence for climate and sustainability at Northeastern University, echoed this.
“Cloud seeding or rain enhancement techniques cannot produce water in the atmosphere where none exists,” Ganguly wrote in an email. “The atmosphere in and around LA was too dry to make cloud seeding methods effective, much less to stop the fires.”
We rate claims that “if they wanted to stop the fires they would make it rain” False.
Our Sources
Threads post, Jan. 12, 2025
Bloomberg News, After week of flames, LA faces high winds and no sign of rain, Jan. 14, 2025
Los Angeles Times, With negligible rain in 8 months, Southern California swings toward drought, Jan. 4, 2025
PolitiFact, No, cloud seeding wasn’t used to create Hurricane Milton, Oct. 10, 2024
Email interview with Katja Friedrich, atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor, University of Colorado, Boulder, Jan. 14, 2025
Email interview with Auroop Ganguly, COE Distinguished Professor; PI, Sustainability & Data Science Lab; Director, AI for Climate and Sustainability; Northeastern University, Jan. 13, 2025
