New AJEM issue profiles warnings

Now available online, the January 2021 issue of the Australian Journal of Emergency Management features Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC research that supports and improves warnings.

Published by the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, this issue collates research papers and news that explore recent changes to warnings and forecasting systems that are improving risk reduction.

In the research paper Forecasting the impacts of severe weather, CRC researchers Dr Serena Schroeter, Dr Harald Richter, Dr David Wilke and Dr Elizabeth Ebert (Bureau of Meteorology), as well as Dr Craig Arthur, Mark Dunford and Martin Wehner (Geoscience Australia) explore the ways in which national meteorological and hydrological services inform severe weather warning information. They present their research, based on the CRC’s Impact-based forecasting for the coastal zone: East Coast Lows project, which reviewed warnings across the world to assess whether they were inclusive of impact-based forecasting. Impact-based forecasting is an important aspect of warnings that contextualises and personalises the information and increases the likelihood that people and communities will take action. Their paper highlights several uncertainties in the warnings that limit the effective impact-based forecasting of multi-hazard events.

CRC research features in the News and Views piece by Dr Joshua Whittaker (University of Wollongong) and Anthony Clark (NSW Rural Fire Service), who write about community engagement research after fires. The article – Research to improve community warnings for bushfires – outlines CRC research for the NSW Rural Fire Service after a number of fires in recent years, and how the findings are informing and supporting the ongoing development of community engagement and bushfire communication in NSW.

This issue also includes information about the new national warning system, a review of flood warnings systems, and many more research reports and papers, including a report from CRC researcher Dr Michael Eburn (Australian National University) about the constitutional and legislative considerations of several recommendations from the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements.

CRC researcher Dr Marta Yebra (Australian National University) has also profiled some of her non-CRC research about the future use of space data from satellites in understanding weather.

You can access the entire AJEM edition online for free. To receive printed copies of the Journal, subscribe through the AJEM website. Subscribe here to receive email alerts when the online editions are available.