Question about hurricans/cyclones

mel.b

I always thought and associated hurricans and cyclones with tropical warm places, however Hurricane Irene and now Hurrican Katia have both travelled a lot further north than i realised they could.

My question is, Queensland gets cyclones, however they never seem to travel south into colder places (although with cyclone Larry earlier this year my parents in Victoria did report significant rainfall in the week after which was attributed to Larry). So why can / do the hurricanes travel up the coast of America and even across the atlantic, but not down the coast of Australia? Is it due to the effect of the jet stream or something else?

cheers,
mel.b

M.T. Cranium

With that family of tropical cyclones (western South Pacific) the Queensland cyclones are like southern Gulf of Mexico type tracks and rarely move very far poleward, the usual track for them is southwest into the outback where weak remnant lows sometimes recurve southeast (as you mentioned in the recent case). Another family of storms to the west of Australia sometimes recurves across the Bight and past Tasmania into the Pacific. Meanwhile further east it's not unusual for strong tropical cyclones to push southeast through North Island of New Zealand or French Polynesia into the central South Pacific and their strong remnant lows sometimes make it across to far southern Chile and go on around the antarctic storm belt.

Meanwhile in the North Atlantic, I would estimate from historical map records that about 20-30 per cent of all tropical storms and hurricanes make it past 45 N and most of these travel further north as extratropical cyclones often into the Iceland to Norway region. Some also travel due north into arctic waters west of Greenland, and one or two like Hazel (1954) have come up across the Great Lakes and into Hudson Bay.

Pacific Ocean typhoons also regularly recurve on a frequent basis and many of their remnants end up in the Gulf of Alaska.