Michael Storey

Michael’s research is analysing operational line scan mapping produced by the New South Wales Rural Fire Service and Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning to understand spot fire behaviour, including distance from main fire front, number of spot fires, their size, and growth. Michael’s PhD will provide important tools to improve the understanding of spot fire and ember behaviour in dry forests of south east Australia, complementing and improving existing fire behaviour models, as extreme bushfire behaviour predictions are based on a limited number of observations.

In 2017 Michael visited the Centre for Forest Fire Studies at the University of Coimbra in Portugal to further his knowledge on topographic influence on extreme fire spread, and the behaviour of merging fires, as well as see first hand the devastation caused by the fires in Portugal just prior to his trip, which took the lives of over 60 people.