Statements made by some of the Australian media commonly imply that Australian tornadoes are a rare or ‘freak’ event. But just how rare are these events climatologically? A new climatology of Australian tornado events from 1795-present has been developed from archived newspapers and web-collections that illustrates that tornadoes in Australia are a regularly occurring event that have regularly been experienced and documented back to the first European settlements. These events range from individual tornadoes to large-scale outbreaks, and have occurred across every state and territory. Analysis of the interannual frequency suggests that the number of tornadoes in any given year can range between 40 and 100 observed events which is likely a conservative estimate of the actual number of tornadoes that occured. Classification of proximal environmental characteristics for the formative environments of these tornadoes were not unusual relative to other tornado environments found worldwide, but generally have a stronger dependence on shear magnitude (rather than direction), and lower lifted condensation levels. These results illustrate a range of tornado-favorable conditions associated with cool season (high shear/low convective available potential energy), tropical cyclone, East Coast low, classical tornado and low shear/storm merger environments.

In this presentation, in addition to discussing the climatology of these not so rare events, we will raise the question of whether the environments that encompass these events are predictable, and how tornadoes may be addressed within the Bureau of Meteorology forecasting framework.