The CEO of a weather modification technology company has confirmed that cloud seeding operations took place in Texas just two days before the deadly central Texas flood occurred.

NBC News reported that Augustus Doricko, the CEO of Rainmaker, a weather modification company, said that planes had released silver iodide in the atmosphere in Texas two days prior to the fatal floods that have claimed over 100 lives.

Doricko claims the cloud seeding operations did not cause the flooding in Texas.

Per Bloomberg:

According to Doricko, Rainmaker flew a brief 20-minute cloud seeding mission in south-central Texas last Tuesday, but suspended all operations that same day due to abnormally high moisture content in the air. The two clouds seeded during the Tuesday flight would have dissipated after a few hours and would have had no effect on the floods several days later, he added.

Cloud seeding involves using chemicals, often particles of silver iodide, to trigger the formation of ice crystals or droplets from water that's already present in a cloud but not being efficiently turned into rain. Though the technique has been studied for decades, it remains difficult to predict the additional rainfall that cloud seeding operations can generate, with estimates ranging widely from 0% to 20%.

What's clear is that the technique would not have been able to generate the record-breaking rainfall seen in Texas. So much rain fell that the Guadalupe River at Kerrville, one of the epicenters of the floods, rose some 26 feet (8 meters) in less than an hour overnight on Friday.

"Based on the meteorological evidence, the Texas floods were caused by a powerful natural weather system, with thunderstorms fed by very moist air from the warm Gulf of Mexico," said Andrew Charlton-Perez, professor of meteorology at the University of Reading in the UK.

In a post on X, Doricko shared, "The last seeding mission prior to the July 4th event was during the early afternoon of July 2nd, when a brief cloud seeding mission was flown over the eastern portions of south-central Texas, and two clouds were seeded."

He added, "The clouds that were seeded on July 2nd dissipated over 24 hours prior to the developing storm complex that would produce the flooding rainfall."