usa.bryanrite.com –

Tropical Cyclone Narelle – a severe storm that has pummelled communities across thousands of kilometres in Australia’s north – was again intensifying on Thursday with several remote towns directly in its destructive path.

The cyclone, which is now a category four system, formed over the Coral Sea off Australia’s far north Queensland coast 10 days ago bringing torrential rain, flooding and destructive winds as it barrelled over the continent’s far north.

The system was set to be the first for 20 years to make landfall as a severe storm in three of Australia’s states and territories.

On Thursday the system was regaining strength to a severe category four storm with wind gusts of 230 km/h as it tracked south just off the coastline of the remote north-west Western Australia.

Small towns including Exmouth, Carnarvon and Denham in the World Heritage-listed Shark Bay were forecast to be in line for “very destructive” winds and potential flash flooding.

In Exmouth, roads and supermarkets were closed and an evacuation centre was set up as the Bureau of Meteorology warned of wind gusts up to 275 km/h later on Thursday.

Zac Saber, manager of the Minderoo Exmouth Research Lab, said the town was busy securing items and taping up windows. While the region was no stranger to cyclones, the size of Narelle had some people concerned.

“Quite a few people have evacuated this time because this is more intense then previous cyclones,” he said

The region is a tourism hotspot and famous for the World Heritage-listed Ningaloo coast where corals last year suffered a major die-off after an unprecedented marine heatwave.

“In a town like Exmouth where there’s a reliance on the health of the reef and the environment, we might see some not too great developments,” said Saber.

Angus Hines, a senior meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, said forecasts had moved the likely track of the storm slightly closer to the coast in the previous 48 hours.

“That means that it is so close to these communities they will cop a lot of the wind and storms even though the central core will still be over the ocean.”

The bureau classifies winds as “destructive” above 125 km/h, he said.

“It’s rare for most parts of Australia to experience winds above 100 km/h. But you double that and you are not even scratching the surface of the potential gusts [from Narelle]. They’re incredibly damaging.

“They can uproot large trees and damage even sturdy structures. They’re exceptionally uncommon and will leave a real scar on the landscape.”

Narelle could graze the coastline at Carnarvon around the middle of Friday, local time, before making a definitive landfall through Shark Bay as a category 3 storm on Friday night.

“It’s going to bring some really major impacts there,” Hines warned.

Without the ocean waters to sustain it, the system was forecast to lose intensity and become a tropical low but still bring up to 60mm of rain on Friday and Saturday for Perth, the state capital.

By then, the system will have travelled more than 6,000 km but could go on to bring rain and wind to the state’s south coast around Esperance.

“That is a long way for a tropical cyclone system to plunge. It’s very rare,” said Hines.

The last tropical cyclone to make landfall as a severe system in three different states and territories was Tropical Cyclone Ingrid in 2005.

Climate scientists have said Narelle’s early formation and intensification had likely been helped by global heating that had raised ocean temperatures in the Coral Sea to record levels in the weeks running up to cyclone’s development.

“Most cyclones don’t live as long as Narelle,” said Hines.

“But the steering winds that push it along have been consistent. The easterly trade flow push it and for the majority of the time it has gone pretty much in a straight line west.”