Published works

As extreme fires cause a disproportionate amount of impact to the environment and the community, there are significant incentives to being able to predict their occurrence and behaviour. Most existing fire behaviour models have been developed based on data and observations of fires that were small to moderate in size. Consequently, they are not able to emulate the dynamic bushfire behaviour that can occur under extreme conditions.

Indeed, current operational fire spread models assume that fires will burn at an approximately constant (quasi-steady) rate of spread under a specific set of environmental conditions (e.g. VESTA, McArthur Mk5, CSIRO models). While a number of advances have been made in understanding bushfire development under extreme conditions, these have not been quantified in a manner that is suitable for inclusion in a fire behaviour modelling framework.

The main aims of this project are to investigate the conditions and processes under which bushfire behaviour undergoes major transitions, including fire convection and plume dynamics, evaluating the consequences of eruptive fire behaviour (spotting events, convection driven wind damage, rapid fire spread) and determining the combination of conditions for such behaviours to occur (e.g. unstable atmosphere, fuel properties and weather conditions). To do this the collation and analysis of existing data on extreme fire behaviour will be done.