Published works

This document has been written to provide a review of the plume-rise literature that is of relevance to two sub-projects of the "Improved prediction of severe weather to reduce community impact" project funded by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre (BNHCRC).  The plume rise literature is a vast body of work that has been reviewed several times by leading experts (e.g., Scorer 1959, Briggs 1975, Briggs 1984, Weil 1988, Arya 1999 Chapter 10).  This document borrows from the review papers and targets only background information relevant to the above-mentioned sub-projects: an ember transport model, and a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) prediction tool.

The ember transport model is being designed as a parameterization tool that represents the distribution of burning embers carried by a wildfire plume.  It is computationally very cheap to run and can be used off-line or within existing fire-spread or coupled fire-atmosphere models.  The model inputs are fire size and intensity, and atmospheric variables such as the background wind field and static stability profile.  The plume rise equations are used to determine ember lofting heights and downwind transport.

The pyroCb prediction tool is designed to identify the potential for pyroCb formation from a single atmospheric sounding.  It can be applied to observed soundings to give single value estimates and applied to model data (numerical weather prediction models, reanalysis data sets, climate model data) to generate maps of pyroCb threat.  A theoretical minimum plume height and buoyancy can be determined from an atmospheric sounding (Tory et al. 2018), which is input to plume rise equations to determine a theoretical minimum fire power required to generate a plume with these minimum qualities.