Tracy revisited: historical perspective, synoptics, track, and winds

When tropical cyclone Tracy (hereafter ‘Tracy’) crossed Darwin on Christmas Day 1974 it became one of Australia’s worst disasters, one that has become part of national folklore. The impact on Darwin changed people’s lives, sent some down lifetime career paths, and resulted in major changes in global insurance industry practices and coastal building codes. Yet Tracy was not a unique event for Darwin, there having been a number of previous occasions in which our major northern community had suffered severely from a cyclone’s passage. Herein we discuss the historical context for Tracy compared to other major events both at Darwin and globally (Section 2). The cyclone was unique in the set of events that all had to happen for it to have such an impact (Section 3): the cyclogenesis region well to the north of Darwin has not seen such an event in 60 years and Tracy was small and moving slowly along an erratic track that just happened to bring it over Darwin along close to the worst possible path. These circumstances are described, along with a general overview of the warnings that were provided and some of the difficulties involved (Section 4). We further make the point that Tracy, as with many other similar disasters, was largely a result of inadequate preparation and response. Tracy revisited: historical perspective, synoptics, track, and winds