From The Conversation (28/2/24)…
We can’t say yet if grid-breakingthunderstorms are getting worse – but we shouldn’t wait to find out
On February 13, six transmission line towers in Victoria were destroyed by extreme wind gusts from thunderstorms, leading to forced electricity outages affecting tens of thousands of people. The intense winds knocked trees onto local power lines or toppled the poles, which caused about 500,000 people to lose power. Some people went without electricity for more than a week. A month earlier, severe thunderstorms and wind took out five transmission towers in Western Australia and caused widespread outages.
Intense thunderstorm events have made news in recent years, including the January 2020 storms that caused the collapse of six transmission towers in Victoria. Perhaps the most far-reaching storms were those in 2016, when all of South Australia lost power for several hours after extreme winds damaged many transmission towers.
So are these thunderstorms with extreme winds getting worse as the climate changes? It’s possible, but we can’t yet say for sure. That’s partly because thunderstorms involve small-scale processes harder to study than bigger weather systems.
