"History provides a limited picture of what can happen from tropical cyclones (TCs). Take the example of Port Hedland or Townsville, with limited numbers of close TC impacts, especially in recent decades, where many communities have gone through rapid growth. How could emergency services in these towns prepare adequately for a major TC strike with no recent experience? How do they know if they have sufficient resources? Will they need to call in resources from other regions or further afield? In this presentation, we will discuss two parts of this problem – developing plausible scenarios of TCs for use in exercises and then evaluating the impacts of a selection of these events to guide planning and response actions for emergency services. GA’s Tropical Cyclone Hazard Assessment (TCHA) provides the backbone of impact scenario modelling – a stochastic catalogue of 10,000 years of plausible TC events that users can delve into. We connect the scenarios to our extensive built environment data collection and the corresponding vulnerability modelling capability to deliver tangible information on the impacts that as-yet unseen events could deliver to communities around our northern coastline.

The datasets created to produce the emergency mapping support products which contributed to fulfilling GA's arrangements in supporting the outcomes sought by the Australian Government during disaster events.

The first step in understanding risk is understanding the hazard. This means knowing the likelihood of the hazard event and its intensity. During 2018, Geoscience Australia updated the Tropical Cyclone Hazard Assessment (TCHA) to better calculate the likelihood of tropical cyclones in Australia.