Some 100,000 people were left without power on Tuesday after a freak storm battered the Australian city of Perth, hurling golf ball-sized hailstones and causing floods and landslides.
Western Australia premier Colin Barnett estimated a damage bill of hundreds of millions of dollars after the wild weather smashed into the city late on Monday, paralysing flights and commuter traffic.
Thousands of residents jammed emergency phone lines as falling trees downed power cables and crashed into homes in the worst storm seen in years. Hospitals were flooded and some damaged schools remained closed on Tuesday.
"I think from my memory this would be the most severe weather conditions we've had since the famous May storm in 1994, where we had very, very strong winds and a massive loss of power supply," Barnett told public broadcaster ABC.
"Hopefully the damage to the power supply won't be as severe but I suspect this time we've got a lot more damage to buildings and housing."
Nearly 160,000 homes lost power at the height of the storm, which brought wind gusts over 120 kilometres (75 miles) per hour and dumped nearly 40 millimetres (1.6 inches) of rain.
Omigod! 75MPH gusts and 1.6 inches of rain! Well, I'll assume it is "freakish" though it sounds like most everyday somewhere in the middle of the U.S. from March to September.
The story also provides a graphic to illustrate their point:
Sheesh! It looks like they were hit by hurricane Katrina!
Intrigued, I went to my favorite tropical storm websites to find out more about this monster storm. Funny thing is, there is no record of it. How can that be? The graphic clearly shows a tropical storm coming out of the Indian Ocean and slamming into South-West Australia.
So, I went to the satellite image data to find out. Here are the images every four hours from Sunday, 20:30 UTC until Monday 20:30 UTC.
As you can clearly see, no tropical storm came barrelling out of the Indian ocean, slamming into the poor population of Perth. Instead, convection in the area blew up into a strong thunderstorm. I'm not exactly sure what is freakish about that, especially as the story points out there was a worse storm in 1994.
This got me to thinking about if Perth had many run in with actual honest-to-goodness tropical systems. So, I once again checked out my favorite site and found out that since 1945 Perth has been hit by at least one tropical storm in the years:
1945
1960
1964
1965
1969
1973
1975
1976
1979
1982
1984
1990
All of which makes me wonder just how "freakish" this storm could have been really.
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