New fire and smoke modelling science underway

New research on fire modelling has commenced for the Victorian Government, which will enhance the understanding of fire weather, bushfire behaviour. 

The User interface platform for the Victorian historical fire weather gridded dataset project will use historical fire weather data from across Victoria to increase strategic and tactical knowledge for firefighting, as well as inform community engagement. The project will be led by Dr Sarah Harris (Country Fire Authority) and Dr Tim Brown (Desert Research Institute, USA) for the Victorian Government’s Safer Together Program, with the research team incorporating information from the database into the existing Google Climate Engine, which will create a web-based system for users to access data on the trends and variability of fire weather. 

Another project for the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning is set to commence on plume air quality modelling. The Plume and air quality modelling project will be led by Fabienne Reisen from CSIRO and will analyse the March 2018 Cobden peat fires, focusing on emissions and downwind concentrations of PM2.5 and CO. 

More research undertaken for DELWP and for CFA will commence in the coming months.