Authors / CoAuthors
Sanabria, L.A. | Cechet, R.P. | Li, J.
Abstract
Wildfires are one of the major natural hazards facing the Australian continent. Chen (2004) rated wildfires as the third largest cause of building damage in Australia during the 20th Century. Most of this damage was due to a few extreme wildfire events. For a vast country like Australia with its sparse network of weather observation sites and short temporal length of records, it is important to employ a range of modelling techniques that involve both observed and modelled data in order to produce fire hazard and risk information/products with utility. This presentation details the use of statistical and deterministic modelling of both observations and synthetic climate model output (downscaled gridded reanalysis information) in the development of extreme fire weather potential maps. Fire danger indices such as the McArthur Fire Forest Danger Index (FFDI) are widely used by fire management agencies to assess fire weather conditions and issue public warnings. FFDI is regularly calculated at weather stations using measurements of weather variables and fuel information. As it has been shown that relatively few extreme events cause most of the impacts, the ability to derive the spatial distribution of the return period of extreme FFDI values contributes important information to the understanding of how potential risk is distributed across the continent. The long-term spatial tendency FFDI has been assessed by calculating the return period of its extreme values from point-based observational data. The frequency and intensity as well as the spatial distribution of FFDI extremes were obtained by applying an advanced spatial interpolation algorithm to the recording stations' measurements. As an illustration maps of 50 and 100-year return-period (RP) of FFDI under current climate conditions are presented (based on both observations and reanalysis climate model output). MODSIM 2013 Conference
Product Type
nonGeographicDataset
eCat Id
75727
Contact for the resource
Custodian
Point of contact
Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Dr GPO Box 378
Canberra
ACT
2601
Australia
Keywords
-
- External PublicationConference Paper
- ( Theme )
-
- risk analysis
- Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)
-
- Environmental Sciences
-
- Published_Internal
Publication Date
2013-01-01T00:00:00
Creation Date
Security Constraints
Legal Constraints
Status
Purpose
Maintenance Information
unknown
Topic Category
environment
Series Information
Lineage
Unknown
Parent Information
Extents
Reference System
Spatial Resolution
Service Information
Associations
Downloads and Links
Source Information
Source data not available.