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Key Points
- Two tornadoes were observed in NSW yesterday.
- Australia experiences about 60-80 tornadoes each year.
- A meteorologist notes many tornadoes are “pretty brief and weak”, countering expectations of severe damage.
Tornadoes were an unexpected feature of the severe weather in NSW.
Many Australians might not realize tornadoes occur in their country. A meteorologist highlights that this happens 60-80 times annually on average, though often in uninhabited areas.
A tornado caused destruction of sheds and trees in the village of Caragabal in central west NSW on Wednesday.
Another tornado was reported near the town of Young, and a suspected one was seen near Cowra online.
Bureau of Meteorology senior meteorologist Dean Narramore told SBS News there are many “weather ingredients” that create the conditions for tornadoes.
“We had a low-pressure system move across the state yesterday — we had warm, moist air ahead of it, then we had a cold front and trough come in that kind of lifted that warm, moist air,” he said.
“We had very strong winds change direction with height, like we started north, coming in from the northeast, moving up to more of a northwesterly, or coming from the west, further up.”
The warm, moist air, combined with a lifting mechanism, and that change in wind speed and direction with height allows supercell thunderstorms to form, Narramore said, which can form tornadoes in the right environment.
Narramore said that while around 60-80 tornadoes occur in Australia on average a year, the figure is about 1,200 in the United States.
While movies tend to show devastating tornadoes, Narramore stated most in Australia and the US are “pretty brief and weak”.
He said that while most tornadoes occur in sparsely inhabited inland areas, they can be identified in satellite and radar data.
Tornadoes occur in two different seasons in Australia — in the winter and early spring months, strong, cold fronts typically bring tornadoes to south-west Western Australia around the Perth area, and sometimes through Adelaide and southern parts of Victoria.
In spring and summer, supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes that can be “stronger, longer, and more impressive visually, as you saw in the video yesterday, they form through much of eastern and south-eastern Australia with that warm, humid air as their main mechanism,” Narramore said.
He said while droughts, floods and larger weather events are increasing as a result of climate change, it’s too hard to tell whether the same applies to tornadoes because they’re “only tens of metres wide”.
A James Cook University online survey of 224 individuals found about 5 per cent were uninformed about tornadoes occurring in Australia, and nearly 20 per cent were uncertain about accessing disaster management information.
Australia’s wild weather
Australia is about to head into peak storm season from October to December and people can expect to see more severe thunderstorms, damaging winds, heavy rainfall, large hail and possibly more tornadoes in the coming months.
On Wednesday, Sydney recorded its wettest September day in 146 years.
Multiple severe weather warnings remain in place, including alerts for damaging winds and hazardous surf across NSW.
The NSW State Emergency Service has received more than 850 calls in 24 hours, mostly due to heavy rain.
— With reporting by the Australian Associated Press.
