Bureau of Meteorology
Cyclone Pam is likely to be a very serious event for Vanuatu and Fiji with winds of up to 200 kmh. That’s not good news for the island nations, for which every cyclone brings a risk of serious physical and economic danger.
Australia’s weather has been almost tropical on the east coast recently, with Sydney experiencing weeks of high humidity and occasional bursts of extremely heavy rainfall. Last night parts of Sydney experienced a storm which veteran emergency services workers described as cyclonic, with large hail.
It’s now Autumn in Australia, and in Brisbane, it’s fair to say they’ve had enough cyclones for the time being, having recently experienced a cyclone, Cyclone Marcia, last month.
Australia’s cyclones can vary from the “mild,” meaning largely that they don’t hit inhabited areas, to catastrophic, like Cyclone Tracey, which demolished Darwin, flattening the entire city.
(Queensland cyclones can be pretty hectic. When I was a kid, I was in one on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane. The rain was like a fire hose, and it was horizontal. The din was indescribable, and we were in a little house over the road from the beach. To this day, I’ve rarely seen anything on TV which equaled the sheer power of the rain and winds.)
Northern Australia has a case of “cyclone fatigue,” in recent years, financially and on a house by house, personal basis for many residents. This is a gigantic area, bigger than Texas, with billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. Residents discovered after Cyclone Yasi a few years ago that their insurance didn’t cover flooding. Rural businesses, particularly food producers, have been hit repeatedly. At one point, food prices in Australia spiked for nearly a year due to cyclone damage.
Many farming and other businesses have been effectively trashed every couple of years or so. The sheer amount of physical damage of the storms can enormous, mainly due to massive flooding.
The large vortex forming on the other side of the equator may be another cyclone in production. To my knowledge, this parallel formation is at least atypical, if not unknown, and it bodes ill for the region. If so, 2015 is shaping up as the year of a plague of cyclones.
Cyclones can do some very strange things. One Queensland cyclone in the early 2000s broke up over the coast, went west, reformed over the Gulf of Carpentaria, and effectively “skated” itself across the Northern Territory. Let’s hope these cyclones don’t get too creative, or this could be a very tough year for the countries and people in the cyclone zone.
