Graph of casualties

	Cyclone Tracy Casualties
deaths	24,374
injuries	5,626
hospitalised	30,000

Conclusion

My opinion based on the work I have done is that I have learned that a Tropical cyclone can damage your life severely but overtime it will get better, and it can be formed from a simple thunderstorm then gradually draw more energy to itself to attain the name Tropical Cyclone a deadly natural disaster/hazard like bushfires or floods. The interesting bit of all is that from a simple thunderstorm you need cooperation from both the ocean and the atmosphere to form a complete Tropical Cyclone which is deadly no matter where it is because if it is in the ocean there will be big waves cause by this hazard and if it were in a continent with people nearby the wind which is fast will cause great damage to everything around it.

3. B)

MURRAY MCLAUGHLIN: The forces of nature have shaped the history of Darwin like no other city in Australia. It’s hard to believe, on a day like today, that cataclysmic weather has battered this place and defined its character.

Back in 1898, Banjo Paterson said that Darwin broke everybody that ever touched it. There was the unbearable heat, there was no water during the dry, and there were flooding rains in the wet. Crops failed and termites devoured any wooden structure. It’s extraordinary that anybody chose to live here.

MURRAY MCLAUGHLIN: Chinese migrants were early stayers. Their legacy is the Asian influence which still touches Darwin. The Quong family has been part of that history since the 1880s, when Chinese outnumbered the European population many times over. Eddy Quong brought his young bride Greta to his home town in 1953.

GRETA QUONG, DARWIN RESIDENT: It was a cultural shock-I was a city girl. And I arrived up here and, my goodness, you know? No gardens, no green lawns, but a wonderful place to live.

MURRAY MCLAUGHLIN: And a good place to bring up kids?

GRETA QUONG: Oh, bringing up family’s wonderful.

DONNA QUONG, DARWIN RESIDENT: It was great growing up in Darwin.

3. A)

First, though, to a turning point-a moment in history after which, for those who went through it, nothing is ever the same again, Christmas Eve, 1974, when Cyclone Tracy virtually wiped Darwin off the map. Looking back 30 years later, Darwin resident Murray McLaughlin discovers how the city he loves, and the people who toughed it out, changed as a result of Tracy.

MURRAY MCLAUGHLIN, REPORTER: A shattered city on the edge of a continent, on the edge of the Asia-Pacific Rim. Brought to its knees not by bombs, not through the destruction of war, but by the forces of nature. This is Darwin on Christmas Day, 1974.

KAY BROWN, DARWIN RESIDENT: A lot of people thought it was only THEIR house that was falling down around them. But when they woke up and they got out in the morning and they saw the devastation, it was terrible.

STEPHANIE BROWN, DARWIN RESIDENT: It was just chaos. There were people walking around in a dream. I saw people that I knew, but I couldn’t talk to them. And it just… It was unreal.

EDDIE QUONG, DARWIN RESIDENT: A lot of people fell apart. A lot of Darwin people never ever came back. They could never face it.

2. B)

The social and economic impacts are the same. I’ll give you a brief example just like what did happen in cyclone Justin (March 1997).

Many of the other social impacts of Cyclone Justin go hand in hand with the economic ones. For instance, some farmers only source of income is their crops, so when their crops were destroyed they didn’t have anything left. This would have being a very stressful time as they would have to find another way to make money in order to rebuild their properties/crops. This could have induced mental anguish on some of the farmers and resulted in them giving up on farming and moving away altogether. A similar situation would be felt by those who were rendered unemployed by the cyclone, as they wouldn’t have an income stream to support themselves on.

Cyclones in Australia can have any of the following environmental impacts:

-Water supplies may be compromised if supplies are contaminated and pipelines cut.

-Sewerage lines may be cut, resulting in a lack of sanitation, and poisons therefore leaching out into the environment.

-If the cyclone brings flooding, there are the usual problems resulting from too much water, e.g. loss of animal and plant habitats.

-Trees may be uprooted, and animal habitats destroyed. This causes the food chain to be broken, and it can be many months before food chain order is re-established among the various species.

-Beaches are often strewn with dead marine or coastal-dwelling creatures.

-Litter ends up in the ocean, destroying animals’ habitats.

-Many coral reefs, fish and animals can be damaged and can take years to recover.

2. A)

The economic impacts of a tropical cyclone could be the loss of income, this means that people who grow food crops and harvests but are wiped out by storm surges of torrential rain. A long term effect of this is with the destruction of crops people will have no trade so they would have no money. This makes it harder to rebuild after a cyclone. Economic impacts relate to money and the loss of it.

Other social impacts, which remain unaccounted for, are on education and culture, health and nutrition, labour and employment and social services. Aside from the total or partial damage to school-buildings are the lost school hours during typhoons or when school houses are used as evacuation centre, the lost opportunity to continue one’s studies due to loss of income, etc. The impact on health could be measured to some extent through mortality rates during disasters, which are closely related to infectious diseases that to a large extent depend on the quality of water consumed and to access to adequate sanitation services. Some third order impacts may result after the occurrence of disasters, such as increased burden on urban resources due to migration displaced local workers to the cities for jobs, increased dependence on government subsidies, worsening the poverty situation, etc.

Part 1 1.B)

A tropical cyclone needs two main ingredients: a cluster of thunderstorms and a warm body of water-at least 27 degrees Celsius-from which the storm gathers its energy. The warm, tropical ocean under a developing storm evaporates then condenses to form clouds, releasing heat throughout the process.

The heat energy combined with the rotation of the Earth gets the cyclone spinning and propels it forward. While the cyclone looks savage from the outside, its low-pressure centre, commonly known as the eye, is deceptively calm. This belies the danger of the dense wall of cloud that surrounds it, which is the deadliest part of a cyclone.

Here the strongest winds and greatest rainfall are found. The eye is usually 40 km in diameter, but can range in size from less than 10 km to over 100km-as is the case with

Yasi-depending on the size of the cyclone itself.

“The thing about Cyclone Yasi is its large diameter.” “We commonly get ‘midgets’ in Queensland-small diameter but still intense tropical cyclones. From time to time we get one of these very, very large one, but the midgets have been more common in recent years. It makes it more unusual for us again to see a large diameter system here.”

Part 1 1.A)

 The tropical cyclones geographical process is formed by a simple thunderstorm. For these thunderstorms to match the strength of a simple cyclone, they have to have the cooperation from both the ocean and the atmosphere.

First of all, the ocean water itself must be warmer than 26.5 degrees Celsius or 81. The heat and moisture from this warm water is ultimately the source of energy for cyclones. Cyclones will weaken rapidly when they travel over land or colder ocean waters-locations where their heat and/or moisture sources do not exist.

Cyclones draw their energy from the warm surface water of the tropics and latent heat of condensation, which explains why cyclones dissipate rapidly once they move over cold water.

A tropical cyclone’s primary energy source is the release of the heat condensation from water vapour condensing at high altitudes, with solar heating being the initial source for evaporation. Therefore, a tropical cyclone can be visualised as a giant vertical heat engine supported by mechanics driven by physical forces such as the rotation and gravity of the Earth.

The tropical cyclones goes at high speeds like a tornado but the tropical cyclones is way worse than a tornado due to it having records of more destruction and pulverisation.

Tropical Cyclones

The reason I chose this type of hazard for my geography assignment/assessment was because I was curious how a Tropical Cyclone starts and then lasts for a long period of time which leaves everything in its path a disaster. The more I think about it, the more the curiosity I get of finding out what happens in a Tropical Cyclone like the eye of a typhoon.  It’s like an unsolved puzzle in your head wanting to be solved like a maze, wanting to get out alive with minor injuries.