Published works

Extreme fires cause disproportionate impacts on 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.

The main aim of this project is 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 project was separated into two phases. The first phase of the project was focused on data collection about extreme fires, analysis the frequency of occurrence of extreme fire phenomena and determination the potential of including them in fire behaviour models.