Bureau of Meteorology updates risk of cyclone forming off coast to 85%

The weather bureau has upgraded the risk of a tropical cyclone forming off the Queensland coast to 85 per cent through the early part of next week.

Transcript

00:00 The atmosphere right now across the Coral Sea, it really is primed for a tropical cyclone.

00:07 So there's a few key ingredients that have to be satisfied before a cyclone will actually

00:11 form.

00:12 One of the first ones is you need a pre-existing area of convergence near the surface.

00:16 That means you need air to be meeting at the surface and we have that right now.

00:20 We already have a tropical low that's formed along the monsoon trough in the Coral Sea.

00:26 Another ingredient is the air has to be unstable.

00:28 That means it's buoyant.

00:29 So if air rises, it'll keep rising up through the atmosphere and we absolutely have an unstable

00:34 atmosphere.

00:35 Another key one is the sea surface temperature.

00:37 Now for a cyclone to form, and we can see a map here actually of the sea surface temperatures

00:40 compared to average, they're currently about one and a half degrees warmer than normal

00:45 where we have that tropical low.

00:47 Now you need sea surface temperatures above 26.5 degrees to produce enough moisture and

00:52 therefore energy for a cyclone to form.

00:55 Currently they're between about 28 and 30 degrees in the Coral Sea.

00:59 So really we just have all the right conditions for a cyclone to form.

01:02 Moving slowly east away from the coast.

01:05 Looks like a little stall though around Friday and Saturday and then generally from about

01:09 Sunday onwards it should start to move towards the south.

01:12 But then it's really from Tuesday that the uncertainty with the system increases rapidly.

01:17 Now what we've got here, we've got a map we can show of the strike probability for next

01:21 Thursday.

01:22 What this map shows is, and it's from the EC model, the chance of a tropical cyclone

01:27 within a 300 kilometre radius of any particular location.

01:30 Now you look at that map, you can see anywhere from New Caledonia to even a coastal crossing

01:35 is possible in a week's time.

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