New online - November 2016

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

The Improved predictions of severe weather to reduce community impact project has published a report on the needs and issues of forecasting pyrocumulonimbus clouds. Pyrocumulonimbus can substantially change the weather characteristics in the vicinity of fires, which may drastically impact fire behaviour. The team surveyed a selection of fire weather forecasters and researchers from Australia and North America to tap into their experiential knowledge, combining thiswith recent results from observational studies and idealised fire plume simulations, to construct a PyroCb conceptual model that best fits all these inputs. This conceptual model should be considered a work in progress. There are many knowledge gaps associated with the model, which will hopefully be filled in the next few years, allowing the development of an improved model.

A literature review on community resilience in remote northern Australia has been completed by the Scoping remote north Australian community resilience team. It provides an overview of current research on community resilience in relation to natural hazards, examining the concepts of vulnerability and resilience in the north Australian context and, in particular, in remote Indigenous communities. It also considers what community resilience means in the context of remote Indigenous communities in northern Australia and how this concept might relate to natural disaster preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery.

Research funded through the CRC's Quick Response Fund, has investigated homelessness and severe storms, with a case study on the June 2016 East Coast Low, with no previous Australian research documenting the homeless community’s preparation for, response to and recovery from an event like the 2016 East Coast storms and floods that can be drawn on for emergency planning. Using interviews with homeless service providers and clients, this research documents the homeless community’s experience of those storms in two locations - the Northern Rivers area on NSW, and Launceston. Interviews highlighted that long-term wet weather is felt to have the greatest impact on people’s physical and mental health and on services’ ability to provide bedding and shelter. The main impacts were loss of temporary dwellings, bedding and possessions, anxiety and isolation, and ability to look after pets when evacuated.

The Fire coalescence and mass spotfire dynamics project has had a paper published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire on the curvature effects in the dynamic propagation of wildfires. The team finds that incorporation of curvature dependence in an empirical fire propagation model provides closer agreement with the observed evolution of field-based experimental fires than without curvature dependence. The local curvature parameter may represent compounded radiation and convective effects near the flame zone of a fire. Findings provide a means to incorporate these effects in a computationally efficient way and may lead to improved prediction capability for empirical models of rate of spread and other fire behaviour characteristics.

PhD student Michael Story has also had a paper published in IJWF, looking at the role of weather, past fire and topography in crown fire occurrence in eastern Australia. Using satellite imagery, 23 of the largest fires in dry sclerophyll forests were mapped from 2002 to 2013. Findings show that fire weather was the most important predictor of crown consumption, with crown fire likelihood as low as 4 years post-fire, peaking at ~10 years post-fire and then declining. There was no clear indication that recent burning became more or less effective as fire weather became more severe. Steeper slope reduced crown fire likelihood, contrary to the assumptions of common fire behaviour equations. More exposed areas (ridges and plains) had higher crown fire likelihood.