Research Advisory Forum - extreme weather

The Extreme Weather Research Advisory Forum, held at the Department of Fire & Emergency Services WA on 30 July, looked at the impact of extreme weather within the emergency management sector. 

The research presented at this forum focused on the improved ability to understand, predict, forecast and monitor severe and high impact weather. Understanding the threat posed to communities is critical for emergency service agencies as it informs appropriate warnings and mitigation actions in the lead up to such weather.

The projects presenting at the Extreme Weather RAF covered:

• Improving the scientific understanding of severe weather in Australia, such as cyclones, severe wind, thunderstorms, floods and fire weather
• Improving the knowledge of how to best predict and forecast this severe weather, including model configuration and interpretation
• Contributing to the post-event analysis and lessons learned from selected severe events that occur during the course of the project
• Informing the development of numerical weather prediction systems specifically for severe weather
• Development of a pilot capability to make useful predictions of community impacts of extreme weather and improving timely mitigation actions and integrating hazard forecasts with exposure and vulnerability data at the community level
• Mitigation actions on critical infrastructure, buildings and homes
• Managing impacts of cascading events.

Research projects that presented at this RAF were:

• Cost-effective mitigation strategy for building related earthquake risk
• Cost-effective mitigation strategy for flood-prone buildings
• Enhancing resilience of critical road infrastructure
• Improving the resilience of existing housing to severe wind events
• Natural hazards exposure information modelling framework
• Urban planning for natural hazard mitigation
• Optimising post-disaster recovery interventions in Australia
• Coupled fire-atmosphere modelling
• Improved predictions of severe weather to reduce community impact
• Improving land dryness measures and forecasts
• Improving flood forecast skill using remote sensing data
• Impact-based forecasting for the coastal zone: East coast lows
• Catastrophic and cascading events: planning and capability

This RAF was aligned with the Prescribed Burning Conference, held at the University of Western Australia on 31 July and 1 August 2019.

All presentation slides are available in the Resources tab below.