The National Hazard Impact Risk Service for Tropical Cyclone Event Impact provides information on the potential impact to residential separate houses due to severe winds. The information is derived from Bureau of Meteorology tropical cyclone forecast tracks, in combination with building location and attributes from the National Exposure Information System and vulnerability models to define the level of impact. Impact data is aggregated to Statistical Area Level 1, categorised into five qualitative levels of impact.

Archive of the data and outputs from the Assessment of Tropical Cyclone Risk in the Pacific Region project. See GA record 76213.

<div>The wind hazard climate in South East Queensland is a combination of tropical cyclones, thunderstorms and synoptic storms. This dataset provides estimated average recurrence interval (ARI) or annual exceedance probability (AEP) wind speeds over the region, based on an evaluation of observational (thunderstorms and synoptic winds) and simulated data (tropical cyclones). </div><div><br></div><div>The tropical cyclone wind hazard was evaluated using Geoscience Australia's Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM), which provides a spatial representation of the AEP wind speeds arising from tropical cyclones. Thunderstorm wind hazard was evaluated from analysis of observed wind gusts across South East Queensland, aggregated into a single 'superstation' to provide a single representative hazard profile for the region.</div><div><br></div><div>The resulting combined wind hazard estimates reflect the dominant source of wind hazard in South East Queensland for the most frequent events (exceedance probabilities greater than 1:50) is thunderstorm-generated wind gusts. For rarer events, with exceedance probabilities less than 1:200, TC are the dominant source of extreme gusts.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>Local effects of topography, land cover and the built environment were incorporated via site exposure multipliers (Arthur & Moghaddam, 2021), which are based on the site exposure multipliers defined in AS/NZS 1170.2 (2021).</div><div><br></div><div>The local wind hazard maps were used to evaluate the financial risk to residential separate houses in South East Queensland.</div><div><br></div><div>Wind speeds are provided for average recurrence intervals ranging from 1 year to 10,000 years. No confidence intervals are provided in the data. </div>

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.

<div>Ask a Queenslander where tropical cyclones (TCs) occur, and the inevitable response will be North Queensland. Whilst most of the tropical cyclones have made landfall north of Bundaberg, the cascading and concurrent effects are felt much further afield. The major flooding following TC Yasi in 2011 and TC Debbie in 2017, are just two examples where impacts were felt across the State, and of course, the wind impacts to the banana plantation following TC Larry (2006) was felt nationally.&nbsp;</div><div> &nbsp;</div><div>South East Queensland has not been forgotten when it comes to tropical cyclone impact with an event crossing Coolangatta in 1954. There was also the more recent TC Gabrielle which tracked offshore on its path southwards to New Zealand.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>Acknowledging that climate is influencing the intensity and frequency of more intense severe weather hazards, understanding how tropical cyclone hazard varies under future climate conditions is critical to risk-based planning in Queensland. With this climate influence, along with increasing population and more vulnerable building design in South East Queensland (relative to northern Queensland), there is an urgent need to assess the wind risk and set in place plans to reduce the impacts of a potential tropical cyclone impact in South East Queensland. <b>Citation:</b> Sexton, J., Tait, M., Turner, H., Arthur, C., Henderson, D., Edwards, M; Preparing for the expected: tropical cyclones in South East Queensland.<i> AJEM</i> 38:4, October 2023, pages 33-39.