@conference {bnh-4767, title = {Australia{\textquoteright}s future national heatwave forecast and warning service: operational considerations.}, booktitle = {AFAC18}, year = {2018}, month = {09/2018}, publisher = {Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC}, organization = {Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC}, address = {Perth}, abstract = {

Heat wave is Australia{\textquoteright}s deadliest natural hazard. It is responsible for more hazardrelated deaths than all other natural hazards combined. The incidence of severe and extreme heatwaves in Australia has been considerable and is projected to increase. Recent efforts to mitigate the impact of this rising frequency and severity of heatwave events across the nation has witnessed State and Territory authorities warning for impacts across human health, infrastructure, utilities, community events and business activities whilst the Bureau of Meteorology introduced a national heatwave service. Consultation across emergency services, health and media sectors has established the requirement for a national heatwave warning framework. Within the health sector separate calls have been made for a nationalised approach to heatwave warnings.\  We describe an operational partnership model for emergency and health agencies community information and warnings facilitated by the Bureau{\textquoteright}s future heatwave forecasts and warnings in a multi-hazard warning framework.\  Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that the Bureau{\textquoteright}s severity scale has skill in predicting health impacts in Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales. The UK Meteorological Office has included the Bureau{\textquoteright}s heatwave and coldwave methodology in their Global Hazard Map project where it is also demonstrating acceptable levels of accuracy in identifying high impact events around the world. The Bureau has supplied a national warm season heatwave severity service since January 2014 in the form of seven continental scale severity maps, updated once a day. Predictive skill and heatwave event severity characterisation reports for summers 201314, 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17 have been circulated to the Bureau{\textquoteright}s internal Heatwave Services Reference Group to enable consideration and validation of the current heatwave service. This verification work is scheduled to continue with upgraded diagnostics included here for the 2017-18 season. Future emergency services and human health information and warning services are prototyped using recently developed gridded heatwave service data. Heatwave forecast and warning services are demonstrated to characterise how each partner{\textquoteright}s information and warning services would have been supported during the 2017-18 summer.\ \ 

}, author = {John Nairn and Robert Fawcett and Linda Anderson-Berry and Bertram Ostendorf and Peng Bi and Chris Beattie and Mark Cannadine} } @conference {bnh-1559, title = {The Heatwaves of the 2013/14 Australian Summer Conference Paper 2014}, booktitle = {Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and AFAC Wellington Conference 2014}, year = {2015}, abstract = {

Heatwaves represent a significant natural hazard in Australia, arguably more hazardous to life than bushfires, tropical cyclones and floods. In the 2008/2009 summer, for example, many more lives were lost to heatwaves than to that summer{\textquoteright}s bushfires which were among the worst in the history of the Australian nation. Yet for many years, these other forms of natural disaster have received much greater public attention than heatwaves. This might be changing in Australia however, as health and emergency services increasingly use weather forecast information to become proactive in providing advice to the community on how to mitigate the effects of heatwaves. Significant community engagement took place during the 2013/2014 Australian summer, a summer which generated some significant heatwaves, comparable to those of 2009, 2004, 1939 and 1908.
In January 2014, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology introduced a pilot national heatwave forecasting service, to issue forecasts of forthcoming non-severe, severe and extreme heatwaves. The service is based on the excess heat factor (EHF) or heatwave intensity concept, which quantifies the extent of the temperature elevation during a heatwave in a manner relevant to the expected impact of the heatwave on human health. The forecasting system makes use of both daily maximum and minimum temperatures, the latter providing implicit information about average humidity levels, without humidity being included explicitly in the calculation.
This paper will document the heatwaves of the 2013/2014 Australian summer, in terms of the EHF metric, and will describe how well they were forecast by the new service.

}, author = {Robert Fawcett and John Nairn} }