Since there's nothing going on here I figured I'd bring this up. On the NW side of Australia there was a tropical cyclone that made landfall yesterday. Everywhere I went, like the navy site, weather underground, Accuweather, it says this was a strong tropical storm at most with 70 mph winds. I was looking at the sat images of it and thinking to myself there’s no way this is only a tropical storm. Then I found this Australian weather site, weatherzone.com.au, and it had a lot more info on the cyclone including that this was a cat 3 storm with 190 kph(118 mph) winds and a central pressure of 960 mb. The site looks pretty credible so I just wonder what’s going on here?
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Ed Dunham
Former Meteorologist & CFHC Forum Moderator (Ed Passed Away on May 14, 2017)
I took a look at the site...and the storm. The site is not official - and the Cyclone was certainly not Cat III. Clare peaked at 09/0000Z with sustained winds of 60 kts and gusts to 75kts, i.e., a strong tropical storm. Follow-on news reports from Perth indicated nothing unusual about Clare (except that Perth was likely to exceed its normal January rainfall total in one day).
I cross-checked against the storm bulletins (courtesy of the University of Hawaii) and found a maximum of 60G75kts. A check of satellite imagery from NRL showed that Clare never formed an eye, so even minimal sustained hurricane strength was not likely.
Hope this helps.
ED
Some of the confusion may be a result of the different scale that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) uses to represent the severity of a given tropical cyclone. A category 3 cyclone on their scale corresponds to what we call a category 1 hurricane. Specifically, wind gusts of 170 km/hr translate to gusts of about 106mph, or sustained winds of 75mph (40% reduction). I believe that the BoM advisories -- which differ from the JTWC (and other tropical warning center) advisories -- classified Clare as a "Severe Tropical Cyclone," which is our equivalent of a hurricane, a minimal one in this case.
Thanks for the info. It makes sense that it was a strong tropical storm or a minimal hurricane. I thought everyone used the Saffir-Simpson scale, but I was obviously wrong. I wonder what the 960 number repersented. Im trying to find out what the unit was but I thought it was equal to a millibar. Obviously wrong here too, just another difference in what unit system countries use.
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