RAYMOND

History

Tropical Cyclone Raymond began as an area of convection off the Western Australian coast on 30 December 2004. The disturbance was slow to organise, initially drifting towards the southeast before reversing and tracking back to the northeast over the following days with little sign of intensification. A renewed southeastward drift commenced on 1 January 2005, and as the system moved it became better organised, with convection building around the centre. It was named Raymond on 2 January while positioned roughly 460 km north-northeast of Broome.

Once named, Raymond took an easterly course towards the Kimberley coast. Its life as a named cyclone was brief: the system reached its peak strength on the same day it was named, with maximum sustained winds of about 85 km/h, placing it at Category 1 on the Australian intensity scale. Raymond crossed the coast just west of Kalumburu, in the far north of Western Australia, at that intensity on 2 January.

The cyclone weakened quickly once it moved inland, losing cyclone status but surviving as a tropical low. The remnant circulation continued eastward across the Top End of the Northern Territory over the next few days, emerging into the Gulf of Carpentaria on 5 January. There it reversed direction and gradually wound down, finally dissipating by 10 January.

Because Raymond was a weak system that crossed a sparsely populated stretch of the Kimberley coast, no damage was reported and there were no casualties. Its most significant legacy was rainfall: Raymond delivered the first substantial wet-season rains to the northern Kimberley, an important early break in the region's monsoon onset.

Raymond was one of a number of systems in a 2004–05 Australian region season that finished slightly below average for tropical cyclone activity. Notably, the same stretch of coast near Kalumburu would be struck again just over two months later, in mid-March, by the far more powerful Severe Tropical Cyclone Ingrid.

Sources: Bureau of Meteorology report Wikipedia