| schema:text
| - WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Cyclone Alfred was started by Chinese warships off the coast of Australia.
OUR VERDICT
False. Experts say there is no technology capable of creating cyclones.
AAP FACTCHECK - As Cyclone Alfred approaches southeast Queensland, false claims about foreign military activity, government interference and weather manipulation are raining down on social media.
Alfred is a category 2 tropical cyclone, forecast to bring heavy rain, strong winds, and flooding to Queensland and northern NSW as it makes landfall.
Several Facebook posts claim that the Chinese military created the cyclone using weather modification technology, linking it to recent live-fire drills conducted by the country's navy in the region.
"Cyclone Alfred is another con started by the Chinese warship off the coast of Australia, it's never going to get here, first they locked us up for Covid and now they are locking us up with fake cyclones," one Facebook post claims.
"So the Chinese warships have b******* off to the west coast. This cyclone is their fault," another post on Threads claims.
Steven Siems, a weather modification expert at Monash University, told AAP FactCheck there is no technology capable of creating a cyclone.
"There is no way that any ship, military or otherwise, could create a weather event like a tropical cyclone," he said.
"Tropical cyclones/typhoons/hurricanes are strictly natural phenomena."
Another widely shared claim suggests that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese intervened to get the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) to change the cyclone's name from "Anthony" to "Alfred."
"How come we have cyclon(sic) Alfred instead of Anthony, because Albo demanded they gange(sic) the name?," one Facebook post reads.
The BoM determines cyclone names based on a pre-approved alphabetical list that alternates between male and female names.
The BoM told AAP that the decision to skip "Anthony" was made before the cyclone had even formed and the decision was not made via request from the federal government.
It follows a policy of avoiding naming cyclones after people who are public figures at the time.
Elsewhere a TikTok video claims to show footage of winds and flooding affecting Queensland on March 5, 2025.
However, on this day Cyclone Alfred was still 325km east of Brisbane.
AAP FactCheck found one of the clips was posted on social media on March 1 and actually shows damage caused by Cyclone Garance, which made landfall on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion.
Other posts falsely claim Cyclone Alfred is a human-made weather event, blaming the United Nations, NEXRAD radars and chemtrails for its formation.
"TROPICAL CYCLONE ALFRED IS A UNITED NATIONS IPCC CHEMTRAILS PLOT TO DEPOPULATE BRISBANE," one Facebook post states.
"EMF beams are directing this to the coastline between Northern Rivers of NSW and the Sunshine Coast," another Facebook post claims.
"There's quite a few NEXRADs involved," one video says while showing a weather radar map of the cyclone's path.
Prof Siems said cyclones are formed by a mix of warm ocean surface temperatures, low-level winds and weak vertical wind shear.
"We have no capability to make changes at the scales necessary to create a tropical cyclone," he said.
Extreme weather events, including tropical cyclones, have become more frequent and intense as a result of climate change, he said.
NEXRAD, short for Next Generation Radar, is a network of weather radars operated by the US National Weather Service.
There are no NEXRAD installations in Australia and experts previously confirmed there is no scientific evidence or physical reasoning to show that radars have the ability to engineer weather.
AAP FactCheck has also debunked claims that Cyclone Alfred is caused by chemtrails or the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a research facility in Alaska that studies the impact of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) on the ionosphere.
Fred Menk, an ionosphere expert from the University of Newcastle, previously explained that HAARP's ionosphere activities do not affect weather formation in the stratosphere or the troposphere, which are many kilometres closer to ground level.
Experts say chemtrails do not exist and the formation of condensation trails behind aeroplanes is due to water vapour and particles emitted from a jet engine's exhaust.
AAP FactCheck is an accredited member of the International Fact-Checking Network. To keep up with our latest fact checks, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, BlueSky, TikTok and YouTube.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)