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 drills1 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 post2 claims.
"So the Chinese warships have b******* off to the west coast. This cyclone is their fault," another post on Threads3 claims.
Steven Siems4, 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 post5 reads.
The BoM determines cyclone names based on a pre-approved alphabetical list6 that alternates between male and female names.
The BoM told AAP7 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 8of avoiding naming cyclones after people who are public figures at the time.
Elsewhere a TikTok video9 claims to show footage of winds and flooding affecting Queensland on March 5, 2025.
However, on this day Cyclone Alfred was still 325km east10 of Brisbane.
AAP FactCheck found one of the clips was posted on social media11 on March 1 and actually shows damage caused by Cyclone Garance, which made landfall on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion12.
Other posts falsely claim Cyclone Alfred is a human-made weather event, blaming the United Nations, NEXRAD13 radars and chemtrails14 for its formation.
"TROPICAL CYCLONE ALFRED IS A UNITED NATIONS IPCC CHEMTRAILS PLOT TO DEPOPULATE BRISBANE," one Facebook post15 states.
"EMF beams are directing this to the coastline between Northern Rivers of NSW and the Sunshine Coast," another Facebook post16 claims.
"There's quite a few NEXRADs involved," one video says 17while 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 shear18.
"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 radars19 operated by the US National Weather Service.
There are no NEXRAD installations in Australia and experts previously 20confirmed there is no scientific evidence or physical reasoning to show that radars have the ability to engineer weather.
AAP FactCheck has also debunked 21claims 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 Menk22, 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 exist23 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 Network24. To keep up with our latest fact checks, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads25, X, BlueSky26, TikTok27 and YouTube28.
