March 7, 2005
By Jack Williams
USA Today

A Category 5 tropical cyclone - the same kind of storm as a hurricane - is threatening Australia's Queensland Coast.

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology has posted a Cyclone Watch for the Coral Sea Coast of Queensland from Port Douglas to the Lockhart River. Port Douglas is just north of Cairns. The northern end of The Great Barrier Reef is offshore from this area.

The Bureau said that at 5 a.m. Tuesday, eastern Australian time (1 p.m. ET Monday) Tropical Cyclone Ingrid was about 180 miles east-northeast of Cooktown with the highest winds estimated to be faster than 155 mph.

Australia uses the same Saffair-Simpson scale the U.S. National Hurricane Center uses.

Unlike the USA, neither Australia nor any of he other nations threatened by Pacific or Indian Ocean tropical cyclones do not have hurricane hunter aircraft that fly into storms to collect precise measurements. Forecasters use satellite images to estimate storm strength.

The Bureau says it expects Ingrid to continue drifting east toward the north Queensland Coast at least into Wednesday (Australian time) with winds faster than 39 mph reaching the coast in the area where the warning is posted some time Wednesday morning (Tuesday afternoon U.S. time).

Only a few cyclones hit the populated Queensland Coast and none has been a major disaster since an unnamed storm that hit northern Queensland in March 1899, destroying a fleet of pearl fishing boats in Brathurst Bay, killing 307 people.

Australia's most famous, and costliest cyclone was Tracy, which hit Darwin on the northern coast on Christmas Day 1974. It killed 65 people and its 135 mph winds destroyed 6,300 of the 9,000 houses in Darwin at the time and seriously damaged another 1,800, according to Hurricane Watch: Forecasting the Deadliest Storms on Earth by Dr. Bob Sheets and Jack Williams.

During the week after the storm authorities evacuated more than half of the 46,000 people who lived in Darwin. There were no nearby towns where they could live while the city was being rebuilt.

Most of Australia's tropical cyclones hit the thinly populated coast to the west of Darwin.

The tropical cyclone season, like the other seasons, is reversed south of the equator. Summer in Australia runs from December through February.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/2005-03-07-cyclone-ingrid_x.htm