Queensland Fire and Emergency Services are leading the development of consistent risk information relating to the potential impacts of disasters across Queensland. The stated aim is to ensure all local, district and state government stakeholders have access to the same information to guide risk-based planning in the preparation for natural disasters. This extends to future projections natural hazard activity, including tropical cyclones (TC), in the Queensland region.

To achieve this last objective, Queensland’s Department of Environment and Science (DES) have undertaken a program of regional climate simulations, with a view to informing long-term planning decisions. When it comes to TCs – a major cause of disasters in Queensland – many of the stakeholders want to answer the question: “How many severe tropical cyclones will the future hold for us?”, or similar questions around the likelihood of TC occurrence.

To answer this, DES and Geoscience Australia are interrogating the regional climate simulations to extract Tropical Cyclone-Like Vortices (TCLVs). The behaviour of these TCLVs is then analysed to understand changes in frequency, intensity and spatial distribution. The TCLVs – with some additional bias corrections - can also be used as input to stochastic models that can provide probabilistic wind hazard information across the entire state of Queensland.

In this paper we demonstrate the challenges of extracting TCLVs from regional climate models and the bias corrections required to make useful projections of TC activity into the future.