Tropical Cyclone Wind Hazard for the Western Pacific  

Authors / CoAuthors

Summons, N.W. | Arthur, W.C.

Abstract

Tropical cyclones pose a significant threat to islands in the tropical western Pacific. The extreme winds from these severe storms can cause extensive damage to housing, infrastructure and food production. As part of the Pacific Climate Change Science Program (PCCSP), Geoscience Australia assessed the wind hazard posed by tropical cyclones for 14 islands in the western Pacific and East Timor. The wind hazard was assessed for both the current climate and for the future climate under the A2 SRES emission scenario. Wind hazard maps were generated using Geoscience Australia's Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM) that applies a statistical-parametric process to estimate return period wind speeds. To obtain a robust estimate of wind hazard from a short historical track record, TCRM produces several thousand years worth of tracks that are statistically similar to the input track dataset. The model then applies a parametric wind profile to these tracks and fits a Generalized Extreme Value distribution to the maximum wind speeds at each location. To estimate how the hazard may change in the future, tracks of Tropical Cyclone-Like Vortices (TCLVs) detected in dynamically downscaled global climate model are used as input into TCRM. This is performed for four downscaled global climate models for two twenty year periods centered on 1990 and 2090 under the A2 SRES emission scenario. This study provides the first detailed assessment of the current wind hazard for this region, despite the fact that these counties are both highly exposed and vulnerable to these severe storms. The hazard climate projections should be treated with caution due to known deficiencies in the global climate models and poor agreement between models of the hazard projections. However, keeping these limitations in mind, the results suggest that the wind hazard will decrease north of 20º latitude in the South Pacific by 2090.

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document

eCat Id

72893

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Keywords

• GA PublicationAbstract

( Theme )

• climate

( Theme )

• wind

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)

• Earth Sciences

• Published_Internal

Publication Date

2011-01-01T00:00:00

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Australian Government Security ClassificationSystem    

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence    

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geoscientificInformation

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