Published works

Heat wave is Australia'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's future heatwave forecasts and warnings in a multi-hazard warning framework.  Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that the Bureau'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'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'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's information and warning services would have been supported during the 2017-18 summer.