MEDIA RELEASE

Today's Sydney Morning Herald headline 'Sydney may be in path of La Nina cyclones" has aroused public concern that Sydney could be battered by a Tropical Cyclone such as Darwin's Tracy or Nicaragua's Hurricane Mitch during the summer season. Such alarm is unwarranted.

Water temperatures on Sydney's coastline are simply not warm enough to maintain a tropical cyclone as far south as Sydney.

However Sydney is occasionally battered by east coast lows, such as the 7 August storm and the Wollongong storm of 17 August, and decaying tropical cyclones, moving south from the Queensland region and losing intensity, can still provide an abundant moisture feed for these Sydney storms.

The storms may well be accompanied by strong gales and very heavy rain but they do not have the destructive intensity of the tropical cyclones that periodically invade Australia's north

And history supports this view. In the more than 200 years since European settlement in Sydney there have been no documented cases of identifiable tropical cyclones reaching Sydney's shore

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For further information contact: Steve Symonds 02 9296 1546, (M) 0417 211 397