Was Hurricane Helene pushed "up the east coast" with purported weather modification systems such as NEXRAD, Doppler and HAARP? No, that's not true: An expert at the government's Air Resources Laboratory told Lead Stories that neither HAARP nor NEXRAD -- a network of high-resolution Doppler weather radars -- can "create, destroy, modify, intensify, or steer hurricanes in any way, shape, or form." NEXRAD imagery in the video on social media showed the progress of Hurricane Helene through Georgia and the Carolinas. It also showed some blue "blooms" that correspond with its weather stations, which show the fall migration of hundreds of thousands of birds.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Instagram on September 27, 2024. It was captioned:
🚨Who says 'you can't control the weather'? They cooked this one up 💨💨✈️and push and pull it wherever they want using Nexrad, Doppler and HAARP. Where are the 'meteorologists'!? This is in our face! We are at war. Pray for those that have been effected by this evil.🙏🏻
#hurricanehelene
#manipulatingtheweather
#creatingsuperstorms
#weathermodification
#doplar
#nexrad
#haarp
#geoengineering
#crimesagainsthumanity
#wakeup
#lookup
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Mon Sep 30 16:25:57 2024 UTC)
Captioning under the video reads:
Pushing 'Helene' up the east coast with Nexrad, Doplar and HAARP
Hurricane Helene's path was not controlled through weather modification. Lead Stories reached out to the public affairs office of the National Weather Service (NWS), the U.S. forecasting branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ask about this claim. We received an email reply from Howard Diamond, Ph.D., director of the Atmospheric Sciences and Modeling Division at NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory. Diamond wrote:
The genesis of Hurricane Helene, as is the case for any hurricane, formed on its own given the right conditions of sea surface temperature and upper atmospheric winds, and that was the case with Helene. HAARP is a small U.S. National Science Foundation funded ionospheric research facility in Fairbanks, Alaska, and for some reason has gained an incorrect reputation on parts of the Internet as being part of some nefarious global weather modification effort. Simply put, it is not, and HAARP had absolutely no connection to the formation of Hurricane Helene, the formation of any other hurricane, or the genesis of any other natural weather event for that matter. Neither HAARP nor NEXRAD can steer hurricanes; no technology that humans have can create, destroy, modify, intensify, or steer hurricanes in any way, shape, or form.
The radar imagery included in the Instagram video is real and shows a partial URL, "https://weather.cod.edu" from the College of DuPage meteorology program. The imagery in the video begins at about 2:35 p.m. on September 26, 2024, as Hurricane Helene moved north along Florida's Gulf Coast before making landfall in the Big Bend area near Perry, Florida, at 11:10 p.m. with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. The imagery continues into September 27, 2024, as the eye of the hurricane continued northward, dropping between five and 15 inches of rain in parts of Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia -- with some rainfall totals topping 20 inches.
Lead Stories reached out to Paul Sirvatka, professor of meteorology at the College of DuPage, to ask about this claim. Sirvatka responded by email on September 30, 2024:
Hurricanes cannot be controlled by any technology known to humanity. It is ridiculous to think that Doppler radar, which is an amazing technological invention, has any impact all all. And although some aspects of experimentation have been accomplished with HAARP, nothing like what is being suggested is possible. Even remotely possible. The so-called evidence of HAARP is just superrefraction of the radar beam due to low-level cooling of the atmosphere in the overnight hours. These 'blooms' of reflectivity are so often used by conspiracists do not indicate anything than what is normal for low-level inversions. We get our web site used often for this nonsense.
The website of the University of Fairbanks High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) answers whether it can influence the weather:
Can HAARP Control or Manipulate the Weather?
No. Radio waves in the frequency ranges that HAARP transmits are not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere--the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth's weather. Since there is no interaction, there is no way to control the weather.
The HAARP system is basically a large radio transmitter. Radio waves interact with electrical charges and currents, and do not significantly interact with the troposphere .
Further, if the ionospheric storms caused by the sun itself don't affect the surface weather, there is no chance that HAARP can either. Electromagnetic interactions only occur in the near vacuum of the rarefied, but electrically charged, region of the atmosphere above about 60-80 km (a little over 45 miles), known as the ionosphere. The ionosphere is created and continuously replenished as the sun's radiation interacts with the highest levels of the Earth's atmosphere.
This claim, through the use of zoom to highlight blue blooms in regions adjacent to the precipitation of Hurricane Helene, was built on a misreading of what the blue "blooms" seen at the NEXRAD stations after sunset actually were. The blooms show the fall migration of hundreds of thousands of birds.
The website of BirdCast, a program that monitors bird migration using weather radar, has a Weather Surveillance Radar and Bird Migration Primer that shows that weather is not the only thing picked up by weather radar. The central panel in the graphic below shows how the "passage migration" of birds appears as they fly through the range of a NEXRAD station.
Lead Stories debunked a similar conspiracy that used real NEXRAD radar images to support a baseless claim that there were microwave energy weapons being directed at Americans while they sleep.
At the time this was written, PolitiFact had reviewed the same claim.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on Hurricane Helene can be found here.
