A COMPANY that claims to be able to create or reduce rainfall with extra low-frequency (ELF) technology, says it used it to intervene in Cyclone Alfred.
On Tuesday, March 4th, Atmospherica director David Miles of Toowoomba posted a public notice on X, announcing that “as a result of private backers stepping forward to fund this unique project for coastal Southeastern Queensland and Northern NSW, Atmospherica has (at 12 AM, on 04/03/25) commenced a Tropical Cyclone Alfred intervention …” to mitigate major weather threats from the Bureau Of Meteorology.
As Cyclone Alfred moved south the BOM warned of damaging to destructive winds, heavy to intense rainfall/flooding, storm surges and coastal inundation.
On Sunday March 9 the cyclone was downgraded to a tropical low pressure storm, but heavy rain persisted almost without break from Sunday to early Monday morning. The low pressure system was moving across Bribie Island north of Brisbane and inland towards the state’s southwest.
Some 300,000 homes were without electricity across the south-east and into northern NSW, and flooding was widespread. Lismore, however, managed to keep the rising floodwater contained within levee walls, stopping a repeat of the disastrous floods in 2022.
So did David Miles’ ELF technology work? Cairns News has not been able to contact Miles by phone but we were able to download his two-page background paper. We have also emailed some questions to him.
Miles has encountered a great deal of scepticism about his claims, and was even accused by a Victorian Farmers Federation representative of being a “snake oil salesman”. The ABC also ran a highly sceptical report on Media Watch, citing a University of NSW atmospheric science professor as saying the technical description of the technology was “gibberish”.
Dr Linden Ashcroft, a senior lecturer in climate science at the University of Melbourne also told the ABC: “There is no proven technique to bring rainfall to an area in drought.”
Cairns News wonders whether Dr Ashcroft has heard of cloud-seeding, a method of rainmaking going back to 1946 and developed further during the Vietnam War in Project Popeye to create cloudbursts to flood Vietcong-controlled territory. It was an extension of the US military’s Project Cirrus that began in 1947.
Cloud seeding has also been conducted for years by Snowy Mountain and Tasmanian hydro-electric dam operators to boost snow falls and in turn boost water supply. Snowy Hydro’s cloud seeding program began experimentally in 2004 and employs ground-based generators to introduce a seeding agent into suitable existing clouds.
We also note that these Australian academics are the same “climate change experts” who would have us believe that burning hydrocarbons and creating CO2 is causing a “climate crisis”.
Miles says a deeper objective of his project is to “demonstrate the capability to edit weather outcomes, ahead of event impact” on farms, communities and cities in harm’s way. “Results from this undertaking will be determined as “success” or “fail” solely based on data collected and published by the Bureau of Meteorology at the end of the week.”
Atmospherica, formerly Miles Research, claims it was vitally successful in securing timely rainfall for clients across the entire Wimmera region of Victoria over the 2019-20 growing season (184 days) during one of the toughest years on record for cereal cropping in Australia.
“Only those farmers who received rain paid. All of them paid,” the company operator David Miles posted on X. But other farmers who did not sign up for the program also benefited, he said.
Miles says he raised private backing to intervene in Cyclone Alfred after unsuccessfully offering Brisbane City Council to cut the cyclone rainfall by half for a fee of $320,000.
