Winds of Change

#38—Are we being hit by tornadoes, or something else?

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You don’t hear much about tornadoes in Australia. They’re almost mythical, their sightings gossiped about at coffee shop counters and on Facebook community pages, rarely officially confirmed, and hence left to the rumour mill like bunyips and yowies. But they exist, and locals in the High Country will tell you we appear to have been hit by a few this year.

Despite the talk, they’re probably not tornadoes—they’re likely to be microbursts, largely unpredictable storm events that erupt in sudden downbursts of intense winds that are as equally fast and destructive as tornados, but with a much a less gossip-worthy name. They’re supposed to be relatively rare, but from what we can see up here, that hasn’t been the case in the past year.

What may have been the edge of one swept through my yard one afternoon earlier this year. My husband, I and my two girls stood at our loungeroom window staring in awe at the whiteout of horizontal rain and wind outside. Gosh it was powerful. We could barely see three metres ahead. Small scrappy branches and leaves shot past like race cars zooming across an Imax screen. And then the power went out. It was a few minutes before the intensity of this ‘alpine cyclone’ eased enough to see through the rain, and when it did, it revealed that many of the trees in our yard had been torn to shreds. The top of one 30 metre tree had been snapped right off and blown across the yard. The destruction moved in a straight line over the range, not channelled through the valley as the winds normally move. Over the hill, some people lay trapped in a tent under a fallen tree, thankfully, alive. Up the road, the folks in town were none the wiser, the rain falling vertically, as you would assume it should. It was almost a day before the power lines were fixed and the electricity returned.

That little windstorm was nothing compared with the destruction of recent weeks. Early spring is generally a breezy time of year around these parts as the cool atmosphere of what should be snow-capped mountains tussles with encroaching warm winds from the north. But weeks of severe winds, sometimes peaking up to around 100 kilometres per hour or more, is very unusual. Fallen trees, many struck down in the prime of their life, are everywhere. And amid this damage is something else: areas of complete carnage, like a giant hand descended from the heavens and ripped the treetops from their trunks in one sweeping line across the hills.

Scientists don’t know enough about microbursts to reliably predict their occurrence, but they do know how they form. Basically, they’re triggered when cold air becomes trapped up high within a thunderstorm, then bursts like a water balloon, smashing down through the warmer air toward the earth with such ferocity that it hits the ground like a bomb before spreading outward like a tsunami of wind levelling everything in its path.

The Microburst

The broader term for such a natural disaster is a downburst, with a microburst being one with a destructive reach of less than 4km and a macroburst being one that extends beyond 4km. These busts are every bit as terrible as the more commonly known tornado, which is why anyone who sees the carnage left behind describes these events as such. But there is one clear difference between a tornado and a downburst that, when you’re standing in its aftermath looking like a stunned mullet, gives you a clue to what the hell it was that just happened. Whereas tornadoes throw debris around in all manner of directions like a toddler having a tantrum, downbursts flatten the debris in one neat direction as if it had been trampled by a stampede of megafauna cows.

There’s been no official confirmation from the Bureau of Meteorology about what caused the extreme damage at the end of August at two known sites, Martins Gap and Gapsted, and it’s unlikely we’ll get any further explanation other than ‘strong winds’.

I happened to drive past one of the unofficial disaster sites at Gapsted last week and my jaw hit the car floor. The line of destruction was clear. Trunk after trunk of strong, sturdy eucalypts had been snapped as easily as toothpicks. Fallen trees were everywhere, largely facing the same direction. And those that managed to remain standing were stripped of their foliage. It was terrible in the most astonishing way. Nothing is more humbling than being confronted with the proof that nature can destroy us, if it wants to.

Footage of damage at Martins Gap, just over the range, looks ten times worse.

If these types of weather events are supposed to be rare, then this year has been an anomaly. It’s suspected that a microburst was responsible for crumpling six large metal transmission lines to the ground in the You Yangs in February. Those Eifel-tower-like structures are strong, and yet they buckled like aluminum foil.

The natural question is, are we experiencing a lone and freakish windy year, or is this a shift toward a ‘new normal’ brought about by climate change?

Dr Milton Speer, a visiting fellow in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, told Caitlin Fitzsimmons at The Sydney Morning Herald that record low sea ice in Antarctica this winter had pushed the polar jet stream further north than usual, while conversely, a marine heatwave in the tropics had pushed the subtropical jet stream further south. The result has been that the faster moving cold jet has bumped heads with the slower moving warm jet over south-eastern Australia. This is unusual in two regards: firstly, because the two jets have come together almost two months earlier than usual; and secondly, because they normally would meet over the Southern Ocean, not the mainland.

The extent to which climate change is affecting global air and sea temperatures as well as polar ice melt could mean that such unstable weather events become more frequent over the southern parts of Australia. And if this year’s anything to gauge the future by, the impact of the polar and tropical jet streams meeting above us again could mean more frequent destructive microbursts.

Meanwhile, here in alpine Victoria, the snow has melted from the peaks and trickled down into the rivers and the ski resorts have shut their doors a month early.

The winds of change are certainly blowing, one way or another.

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Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week:

• The Parking Lot Blues—by

  Rick Morton

  I was waiting for the police to crash tackle Rick’s mum over the sink tap, but it seems she made a lucky escape.

• Venerable venery—by

  Kate Morgan Reade

  An ‘unkindness of ravens’ and a ‘kindle of kittens’—Kate discovers the origins of these somewhat absurd collective nouns.

• Anne Spencer - 5 Short Poems (1920-1975)—by

  Dick Whyte

  Dick shines a glowing light on civil rights activist and feminist Anne Spencer.

Etymology Monday

For those who missed it on Substack Notes, this week’s word is:

stigma

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