Student researcher

Darryl Dixon Research Leader

To improve bushfire mitigation options and to provide more accurate, timely and comprehensive warnings to the community, a sound basis for modeling the propagation of bushfires is essential. The spread of bushfires is highly sensitive to wind speed and direction: in particular, sudden changes in wind characteristics across the landscape and in time can result in drastic changes in the rate and direction of fire spread (Sharples, McRae et al. 2012). Accurate estimation of wind fields across the landscape and over time is thus a crucial component of bushfire spread modeling. Estimation of wind fields across rugged terrain is problematic, and the complex interactions between prevailing winds and varying landscape features are often over-simplified within bushfire models.