List of retired Australian region cyclone names
| Part of a series on |
| Tropical cyclones |
|---|
| Tropical cyclones portal |
Tropical cyclones are non-frontal, low-pressure systems that develop, within an environment of warm sea surface temperatures and little vertical wind shear aloft. Within the Australian region, names are assigned from three pre-determined lists, to such systems, once they reach or exceed ten–minute sustained wind speeds of 65 km/h (40 mph), near the center, by either the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Papua New Guinea's National Weather Service or Indonesia's Badan Meteorologi Klimatologi dan Geofisika. Within the Australian region, tropical cyclones have been officially named since the 1963–64 Australian region cyclone season, though several meteorological papers show that a few tropical cyclones were named before 1964–65. The names of significant tropical cyclones that cause a high amount of damage and/or loss of life are retired from the lists of tropical cyclone names by the World Meteorological Organization's RA V Tropical Cyclone Committee at their bi-annual meeting. Storms named by Port Moresby are automatically retired regardless of their impact due to their infrequent occurrence.
Within the Australian region, there have been a total of 136 tropical cyclone names retired. Among the retired storms are cyclones Gwenda and Inigo, two of the most intense systems ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere; both attained a barometric pressure of 900 hPa (26.58 inHg). The deadliest cyclone to have its name retired was Cyclone Freddy in 2023, which killed 1,434 people across the Indian Ocean, while the most damaging system to have its name retired was Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023, which left A$12.6 billion (US$8.4 billion 2023 USD) in losses; however, their effects occurred outside the Australian region, with Freddy impacting Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique in the South-West Indian Ocean, and Gabrielle affecting New Zealand in the South Pacific Ocean as an extratropical system. Therefore, the deadliest cyclone to have its name retired and whose effects were solely concentrated in the Australian region was Cyclone Seroja in 2021, which killed 272 people in East Timor and Indonesia, and the costliest cyclone to have its name retired for its impacts within the basin was Cyclone Debbie in 2017, which caused A$3.5 billion (US$2.67 billion) worth of damages.