Rhrosty please get your facts straight before arguing mate.

The eye passed over the full official weather station on Middle Percy island.

Jennifer is giving you the actual figures recorded by that station.

Some of us have considerable personal physical experience of cyclones. We have a damn sight more than the BOM staff in their capital city offices.

We have been involved in the clean up after minor blows like this one, & a few that were somewhat more vicious. Many of us know what the damage of various strength cyclones looks like, because we have experienced it. A big cat 4 leaves only broken sticks in places like Yeppoon.

With one we had been in the eye, [flat calm], for 6 hours before the bureau finally realised they were reporting local storms on the northern edge of the eye as the eye. If you want to explain how the eye of a cyclone works, please do it at the BOM. Very few, if any of them have ever seen one, except on radar.

Yes, 6 hours after we had phoned them & told them they finally figured it out. It was a 60 mile diameter eye. Stop considering government staff are the font of all knowledge, & realise those dealing with theory all their lives should try to learn from those with genuine experience. It might help get them out of their incestuous love affair with models, & closer to the truth.

WTF?
I am used to listening to and overhearing blokes talking about how they have been through a cyclone.

Often I hear comments such as “it was nothing”, “don’t know what all the fuss was about”, and “I drank half a bottle of rum and slept through it”.

Typically when pressed for more detail the story is obviously made up bravado as the eye of the cyclone passed 250km to the north or south of the story teller.

Sensible people who have taken a direct hit from a cyclone rarely offer comments to others except to advise others about what type of precautions to take.

Sensible people will continue to listen to the BOM reports and will be prepared accordingly.

You know WTF, I have found that it is common for someone who accuses others of lying is usually proven to be speaking from experience of their own behavior.

Has, you are another one happy to rely on computer modeling to locate the eye and its track, but then dismiss the figures they seems to present?

You simply can't have it both ways.

Credible reports put us in the path of a category 5 cyclone, that was thankfully downgraded to a category 4, before it crossed the coast, and a little further north of the projected path?

Which possibly infers it was also a little north of the aforementioned island?

Which would possibly explain the different readings?

Even so, no case has been made to support inflation, deliberate or otherwise!

Perhaps if Jenny were prepared to name names, and provide some/any credible evidence to support her arguably wild allegations, those she critiques, might be able to find some legal redress via the courts?

It's simply not good enough to rubbish the reputations of some very committed professionals, who as usual, supply to the best of their ability and budget, life saving information!

Perhaps you might care to stand in for Jenny and supply the names of people seemingly charged with rank incompetence by Jenny? Who for mine, should put up or shut up.

Inferring incompetence just doesn't make it so!
Rhrosty.

WTF?

Hasbeen,
If you want to self-exclude from my classification of a sensible person by all means do so.

Pretty typical comment thread on OLO I'm afraid. Various anonymous trolls accuse a respected scientist of making up facts that the trolls could check, if they could be bothered risking being wrong or didn't just have an agenda.

But instead they all play the person instead of the ball. One even referring to the author as "Jenny" when she quite clearly refers to herself as "Jennifer". I hesitate to say it is sexism (I bet he doesn't do it to his "mates") but it is certainly disrespectful and meant to diminish the person.

The facts in the article are undeniable, and the BOM has to apologise, withdraw, and probably terminate someone's employment.

I've seen the results of a Category 5 cyclone in Darwin, almost 40 years ago. Suburb after suburb of demolished houses. Brick two storey units where the top storey had been blown off.

People tell me similar stories about Yasi. There was nothing like that here. And we know why - because it wasn't like that, and the BOM's own data bear that out.

Makes me sick that so many of the commenters on this site are activists who have no interest in the truth, but just want to spread disinformation because it suits their political agenda, and they don't care who gets hurt in the process.

If it wasn't so they'd argue about the facts.