Yet to be confirmed but possible this was the strongest TC on record at land fall in that region. Be interesting to see how the official assessment go. That’s based on mean winds, and might turn out that it fell short. It is hard to know with such things. As we saw the sensors on both AWSs which fell under the storm failed just shy of 300km/hr. I find it quite interesting that they can survive even to those levels, but guess fortunately there isn’t too much debris on small islands. The photos from Pardoo looked like tornado like damage with tree stripped off leaves, which is pretty unusual. Tough times for those folks, but hopefully all fixed soon.
The local climate conditions were extreme. SSTs off the coast are just above 32C at their peak and the cyclone was ventilated by a strong approach upper trough. Very lucky that the region is so sparsely populated and the tilde have a very big range so damaging storm surges are rare. I suspect the reason why our rainfall is holding up atm despite the rapidly warming pacific is because we are tapping that region for moisture.
One thing to watch is the flip side benefit of the system. Apparently the TC Seroja in 2021 was a key factor in the record wheat crop that year in WA. Heard a quote that it was responsible for 5 million tons which is probably an overestimate but might be ball park. That puts the rain from the system at somewhere between $1 and $2 billion of benefit.
Anyway, back to our weather next post which looks pretty interesting on the latest runs.
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