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Wednesday 7 May 2008 (Updated 2pm Fri 9 May)

RAPID ROUNDUP: Tropical Cyclone Nargis

Early on Saturday morning 2 May 2008 Tropical Cyclone Nargis with 120-mile-per-hour winds and a 12-foot water surge has left up to 50,000 Burmese dead. Below an expert from the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate comments on the severity of the cyclone and provides two NASA images for use by journalists.

A number of Australian scientists are available for media interviews. If you wish to speak to an expert, don’t hesitate to contact the AusSMC on (08) 8207 7415. Feel free to use this quote in your stories. Any further quotes will be posted here as they come to hand.

Dr Lindsay Campbell is head of the Science Group in the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at Sydney University and has expertise in agronomy and agricultural science.

"The current situation in Burma is that the previous rice crop has been harvested and removed from the rice paddies where the cyclone hit. However, we believe that most of the rice has been stored locally in bins and may have been inundated with water. How much rice is lost depends on how quickly the flood waters retreat.

The Burmese plant two or three rice crops per year and the next crop is due to be planted in about a month. But a major question is whether there will be any rice seed to plant. If the local rice seed has been destroyed it will be difficult for farmers to get hold of new rice seed of the right variety for local conditions. They may be able to get rice seed from other countries but this is far from easy. Another issue for Burmese farmers could be access to fertilisers which they use for rotation crops (between rice crops) and this could ultimately lead to lower rice yields.

Burma is far from self-sufficient and imports rice from other countries. Recently neighbouring countries such as China, India and Vietnam have stopped exporting rice in order to meet domestic demand. Though Australia is not a major producer of rice, it exports 85% of its rice to wealthier countries (Australia's rice crop would normally feed approximately 20 million people one bowl of rice per day for a year). The most recent Australian rice crop failed and so instead of producing 1.5 million tonnes we only produced 15,000 tonnes resulting in rice going off the export market here. This means that the countries that normally import from Australia will be wanting to hold on to their own rice or import from other countries, which could indirectly effect Burma. In many countries, the price of rice has more than doubled in the past 12 months. The Burmese are poor and if they try to import rice they will be paying higher prices.

One short term solution is for countries to give rice supplies as aid. But this must not be prolonged because in the longer term it could wipe out the local rice market in Burma."

Professor Graeme Batten is Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Sydney and a Program Leader at the Rice CRC.

"Burmese have very high rice consumption. It is the highest in the world at about 200 kg rice per person per year. The Australian figure is about 12 kg/person/year".

Associate Professor Robert Heath, School of Management, University of South Australia. Robert is a consultant in risk, intelligence and crisis and emergency management.

“The Burmese government Junta may see this event as a politically convenient way to account for people who may be missing and dispossessed for other reasons including social decay.

It is the combination of storm surge (not tidal waves), low land, large populations, limited infrastructure, and limited transportation capacity which has resulted in such a large loss of life. A crisis or disaster is only a true crisis if it exceeds available management and supply resources. To be fully prepared for a rare event such as this, which could be a 1 in 30, 50 or even 100 year event, would require such huge levels of resources and people that maintaining it could lead to national bankruptcy. This means even in Australia we would struggle to cope (as was the case in the Katrina-Rita series of events in the USA). What is needed is more skills in broad picture thinking and flexible decision making rather than more bureaucratic swamps and quicksand.

Before we all rush around blaming climate change for a single event such as this it is important to note that there are historic records of similar large losses of life as a result of in hurricanes, cyclones or typhoons. In fact there was an equivalent event in the 1970s in what is now Bangladesh.

We again ignore national and regional sensitivities at our peril – we cannot save the world from change or danger. Indeed, we need to look at our own decayed resilience in terms of substance abuse/dependency and false expectations before we assume high moral ground.

Commentators and 'disaster experts' need to look at international political conventions, logistics, and applied human psychology before making otherwise ill-informed comments that exacerbate public expectation causing angst and frustration.”

Dr John L McBride is Leader of the Research Group on Weather and Environmental Prediction at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR), a partnership between the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO.

WIND SPEEDS:
“Tropical Cyclone Nargis was an early season tropical cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. It made landfall on the 2nd of May in the low lying delta region of the Irrawaddy River. Nargis was a category 4 Severe Tropical Cyclone, carrying sustained wind speeds of over 160 km/hr, with wind gusts exceeding 225 km/hr.”

STORM SURGE: REASON FOR HIGH DEATH RATE
“The reason for the very high number of deaths is the fact that tropical cyclone carried with it a phenomenon known as storm surge, which is basically a piling up of sea water by the sustained hurricane force winds as the cyclone approached the coastline. In a severe tropical cyclone of the strength of Nargis, the storm surge would typically be several metres in height.

In combination with this, the area of landfall is a vast coastal plain of low-lying river delta. In an agricultural country like Burma, such regions are heavily populated. When a storm surge occurs, there is no high level ground to which people can evacuate. Thus the high death rate would be mainly connected with sea water flooding from the storm surge. There have been major disasters in river deltas in this part of the world before, most notably the Bangladesh tropical cyclone of 1970, which the records show killed 300, 000 people”.

LOSS OF RICE CROP: “Besides the disaster in loss of human life, the cyclone landfall also occurred at the time of the winter rice harvest, rice being one of the major export products of Burma”.

AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH:
“Tropical cyclones impact is a major topic of research for atmospheric scientists around the world, and is one of the fields of specialty of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR)”.

CLIMATE CHANGE:
“As was written in the expert statement on tropical cyclones and climate change by the World Meteorological Organization in 2006, “ The recent increase in societal impact from tropical cyclones has largely been caused by rising concentrations of population and infrastructure in coastal regions.” In terms of the impact of climate change, the expert statement says, “If the projected rise in sea level due to global warming occurs, then the vulnerability to tropical cyclone storm surge flooding would increase.

The deaths associated with Nargis CANNOT be attributed to climate change; but with the projected sea level rises, the probability of occurrence of such incidents would be expected to go up.”

IMAGES
A satellite image of Tropical cyclone Nargis from the MODIS satellite while over the Bay of Bengal. Click here for image (source –attribution: NASA MODIS)

Click here for an enhanced satellite image of the region in the days following the landfall of cyclone Nargis. This image shows large areas of the region under flood water. The source of this image is NASA Earth Observatory (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3 )