Hazards Tropical cyclone and severe wind
Last updated:18 June 2024
Geoscience Australia’s Community Safety team supports Australia’s ability to manage the impact of tropical cyclones and severe wind, and helps inform decisions about risk.
We contribute to each stage of the emergency management cycle to help improve preparedness, response and recovery with our focus on contributing towards community safety.
Our role
To help understand what could be at threat from tropical cyclones, we provide exposure information about buildings, demographics, community infrastructure and agricultural commodities.
We also provide around the clock access to data about people, property and infrastructure potentially exposed during an event. Our information aids in providing an understanding of a tropical cyclone situation to targeted preparedness, response and recovery efforts.
We develop national-scale tropical cyclone wind hazard assessments of severe events to evaluate the likelihood and magnitude of tropical cyclone events.
Our local impact models provide vital information to help communities plan for and reduce the impacts from the threat of tropical cyclones.
We provide data that helps evaluate local wind speeds over topography and different land cover types and house over 160,000 plausible future tropical cyclone scenarios that can be used in cyclone risk management and planning.
Our Hazard Impact Assessment brings together hazard, exposure and vulnerability data in one piece of software to calculate damage caused by a natural hazard.
These products, tools and data provide better understanding of hazard vulnerabilities for all sectors to plan, prepare and reduce exposure to natural hazards improving preparedness now and into the future.
Emerging capabilities
We engage with different sectors to provide assessments and address new challenges as they emerge.
- We are developing a Severe wind hazard assessment for South East Queensland
- Our Researchers are committed to growing our knowledge base to prepare for challenges of the future.
- We have a strong attendance at conferences and events to maintain awareness of the challenges faced by the community safety sector and keep up to date with latest science.
- Our open-source data is accessed by developers interested in solving operational challenges of reducing vulnerability and exposure to hazards.
Top products
Tropical Cyclone Hazard Assessment (TCHA)
Define the severe wind hazard posed by tropical cyclones in Australia. Use it to calculate local cyclone impact models and develop evidence-based evacuation plans and mitigation strategies.
Tropical Cyclone Scenario Selector Tool
Use this interactive tool for querying, visualising and downloading cyclone scenarios plausible future tropical cyclone scenarios used for risk management and planning.
Wind multipliers
Learn more about our significant research on wind speed undertaken due to its importance in predicting, mitigating and managing major risks and hazards caused by wind.
Case study Partnering with QFES for tropical cyclone hazard assessment
How science and data were combined to help Queensland’s emergency managers plan for and reduce the impacts of tropical cyclone hazards.
Talk to us about your challenges
Contact us
To find out how our natural hazard information and research could help you, please call the Community Safety team on 1800 800 173 or email hazards@ga.gov.au
Collaborate with us
To discuss how we can work together to manage the impacts of Australia's natural hazards, please call the Community Safety team on 1800 800 173 or email hazards@ga.gov.au
Work with us
To find out more about joining Geoscience Australia's Community Safety team, please email clientservices@ga.gov.au or visit our careers portal