New online - April 2016

New journal articles and reports on CRC research are now available online.

The Practical decision tools for improved decision-making project has published a report that proposes tools to monitor incident management teams. There are a number of methods for examining the performance of teams, but none have been used in an emergency management context. The report reports on trials of two of these methods.

A number of journal articles have been published, from both Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and Bushfire CRC research. The Scientific diversity, scientific uncertainty and risk mitigation policy and planning study has a paper that reports on a case study of the Barwon-Otway area of Victoria. The area has recently been a pilot site for a new risk mitigation strategy utilising the bushfire simulation model PHOENIX RapidFire. Against simple equations between ‘more science’ and ‘less uncertainty,’ the paper presents results from interviews and a workshop with practitioners to investigate how scientific research interacts with and informs both bushfire policy and practice. This paper is available for free download until 20 May.

The Decision support system project has had a paper published that covers multiple plausible futures for climate, technology and socio-economics. The paper presents a multidisciplinary perspective on how these factors fit together to facilitate the development of strategies that are best suited to dealing with a deeply uncertain future.

Two PhD students have had papers published. Roozbeh Hasanzadeh Nafari presents a newly derived flood loss function for Australian residential structures, calibrated by using historic data collected from an extreme flood in Queensland in 2013. Results indicate that the precision of flood damage models is strongly dependent on selected stage damage curves, and flood damage estimation. This paper is available for free download.

Also available via a free download is a paper by Graham Dwyer, showing how sensemaking and learning has occurred during public inquires that have followed three major bushfires. 

Two papers have also been published from former Bushfire CRC projects. A paper examines the role of the value and expectancy tied to potential outcomes of defending vs evacuating on awareness of a bushfire. The study among 339 people in Western Australia revealed that residents intending to leave immediately on awareness of a bushfire differ from those not intending to leave immediately in both value and expectancy. Findings have important implications for strategies to influence residents’ response-related decision-making.

Also published is a paper on the fire behaviour of the December 2007 Rocky River fire on Kangaroo Island. The fire was simulated using the coupled atmosphere-fire behaviour model WRF-SFIRE, showing a number of interesting dynamical processes resulting from fire-atmosphere feedback. Findings raise questions as to the appropriate information to include in meteorological forecasts for fires, as well as future use of coupled and uncoupled fire simulation models in both operational and research settings.