Risk Wise

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inundation warning’ provide better advice on the level of risk, which

is easier to communicate to the community. The category of no threat

is particularly important, as it eliminates 90 per cent of public

concern that results from international and national media reports

of weak and/or distant seismic events. The Bureau of Meteorology is

utilising public focus groups and media advice to ensure clear and

fast messages are delivered to the public. A science programme and

updated instrumentation now support these stratified warnings.

Australia’s second deep ocean tsunami buoy is located just off an

earthquake fault line to provide maximum warning lead time. This

is one of several different types of detection instrumentation.

Interactions with emergency agencies are a key component

throughout the warning process. Australia has pursued strong inter-

national ties to ensure that other countries in the Southwest Pacific

and Indian Ocean have the capacity to put in place similar systems

and public campaigns.

Indigenous broadcaster training

In remote parts of Australia, particularly in the tropics, there are

many indigenous communities that are isolated from the mainstream

media. The Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities

Scheme (BRACS), was introduced in the late 1980s, providing

resources that would allow indigenous communities to broadcast

locally produced radio and television as well as managing content

received from the mainstream networks. BRACS stations often

provide a community’s only significant portal to the

world.

One important task these stations perform is broad-

casting the news and local weather, including official

warnings for hazardous conditions. Presenters are drawn

from the local communities and receive limited training

in the basics of broadcast techniques. While this is suffi-

cient for the provision of an adequate broadcast service,

it can be lacking in some of the finer points of broad-

casting – importantly, the process of providing

information on hazards to the community, which relies

on the broadcaster’s understanding of the hazard, the

scope of the risk, and the relevance to the community.

These remote communities are vulnerable to events

like tropical cyclones and severe thunderstorms. When

official weather warnings are issued, these presenters

need to pass the message to the community so they can

take appropriate action. This includes translation of the

warning into the local indigenous dialects. Since the

presenters are from the community, they will generally

know the needs and capabilities of the community. What

may be lacking is knowledge of community vulnerabil-

ities, and understanding of the warning they are

broadcasting.

To address this knowledge shortfall, a workshop was

held in 2007 to determine training requirements. The

following requirements were identified:

• Brief layman’s summary of meteorological phenom-

ena and their causes

• Summary of severe weather phenomena and threat

to the community, along with the provision of

public education materials (posters, brochures,

disaster mitigation checklists etc.)

• Explanation of common terms used in forecasts and

warnings

• Hands-on exercises using synoptic charts, radar and

satellite imagery, and forecasts associated with past

significant events.

Also recognised was the need for the Bureau of

Meteorology to avoid the use of overly technical or

obscure language in its products. A product accurate in

the pure grammatical sense of its construction and word

use may be unintelligible to many users, particularly

those for whom English is a second language.

Queensland storm surges under climate change

The Queensland east coast is impacted most years by

tropical cyclones that typically cause severe winds, storm

surge and extreme wave conditions over a wide area. To

better assess the likely impacts, the Queensland Climate

Change and Community Vulnerability to Tropical

Cyclones project updated and extended previous esti-

mates of the storm tide inundation risk in Queensland.

The project scope included the effects of extreme wave

conditions in selected areas, and estimates of potential

enhanced greenhouse climate impacts within the full

context of the naturally complex climatic variability of

tropical cyclones.

Storm tide hazard guide

Cairns emergency zones