Published works

Smoke dispersion is a key concern for Government agencies. Government has a responsibility to protect community health in response to smoke events and to minimise the impact of smoke from planned burning.  To inform community warnings and planned burn management, quality information is needed to support evidence-based decision making.

The Bureau of Meteorology has operated the HYSPLIT smoke dispersion system for use by fire and land management agencies for around 15 years. Recently DELWP funded research to improve smoke emission and transport modelling in Victoria. This project developed a new multi-tiered quantitative smoke prediction system which is a significant step forward compared with the old system.  It applies recent observations of Victorian smoke emissions and atmospheric chemistry (as embodied in CSIRO’s Chemical Transport Model) with the increased numerical capability in ensemble and high resolution weather modelling of the Bureau’s ACCESS Numerical Weather Prediction suite.

The new smoke forecasting system has 3 tiers; Tier 1: 10-day ensemble forecasts of fire weather and fire danger indices to assist decisions on burn scheduling, Tier 2: 3-day forecasts of ambient air quality and smoke concentration from existing fires to provide background conditions for burns, and Tier 3: 1-day high resolution forecasts of smoke for planned prescribed burns to support go/no-go decisions.

In this presentation we will demonstrate the improved user interface for the smoke dispersion system and provide examples of output for each of the 3 forecast tiers. We will also describe the methodology for verifying the system output, including initial verification results. Finally areas of potential future work will be discussed, including how other jurisdictions can be involved so that this can become a national smoke dispersion system.