Updating fire weather potential

Fire behaviour is influenced by a range of weather variables including recent precipitation, current wind speed, humidity and temperature.

Data for these weather variables (expressed as an average or single daily snapshot, or daily combined maximum/minimums) are commonly used to define the daily fire weather indices (e.g., forest fire danger index (FFDI)) used to qualify indicative fire weather severity and future trends.

NBIC applies an enhanced approach to fire weather potential analytics by considering hourly concurrent weather data.

Hourly weather produces more detailed and relevant estimates of potential intensity and persistence of threats to the built assets at a specific location.

With hourly weather data far more relevant inputs for before and after simulations for prescribed burning operations are achieved.

Including climate change

As the effects of climate change become more pronounced over time fire weather conditions and bushfire behaviour are projected to change.

Using an ensemble of global climate models to derive a range of future weather conditions, NBIC produces climate adjusted fire weather potential.

Merging this with hourly concurrent fire weather data has enabled characterisation of both baseline and projections of Annual Exceedance Probability (or Return Time Interval) fire weather occurrences that persist over the duration of hours. This has not been done before.

NBIC’s methodology aligns with other research into extreme weather events and may be transferrable to other hazards such as floods.