Tropical Cyclones

Holland and McBride relate that during the evening of 4 March a severe tropical cyclone now known as the Bathurst Bay Hurricane destroyed most of the fleet of pearling luggers anchored in the Bay with the loss of 300 lives. Poor Wragge continued in ignorance of the destruction until news reached Brisbane some time later.

A detailed account of the cyclone and the associated storm surge which raised the level of the ocean to an estimated height of 15 metres (50 feet), together with a graphic description of the destruction of luggers and shore installations has been described by Whittingham (1958). His report, made after painstaking research of documents, was typical of the scientific approach of Herbie Whittingham, my colleague of the Allied Air HQ meteorological section, Brisbane, during the war.

Wragge, like many Australian meteorologists in later years, was disadvantaged by a lack of knowledge of the nature of tropical cyclones and a completely inadequate network of observations which made it impossible to detect the cyclone, and predict its movement and intensity.

It was not until the US Weather Bureau used the observations of military reconnaissance aircraft during and after World War II that the details of the structure of the tropical cyclone (called a hurricane in the North Atlantic and a typhoon in the North-west Pacific) became well known. Even in the Dwyer years there was still some discussion of the mechanism associated with the deepening and movement of tropical cyclones but the improvement in surface and upper air observational networks and the realisation that the 10 cm radars acquired by H. N. Warren for wind-finding could be used for the detection of tropical cyclones gave promise of an improvement in the Bureau's tropical cyclone warning service.

Bureau of Meteorology