As part of the Australian Government's National CO2 Infrastructure Plan (NCIP), Geoscience Australia undertook a CO2 storage assessment of the Vlaming Sub-basin. The Vlaming Sub-basin a Mesozoic depocentre within the offshore southern Perth Basin located about 30 km west of Perth, Western Australia. The main depocentres formed during the Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous extension. The post-rift succession comprises up to 1500 m of a complex fluvio-deltaic, shelfal and submarine fan system. Close proximity of the Vlaming Sub-basin to industrial sources of CO2 emissions in the Perth area drives the search for storage solutions. The Early Cretaceous Gage Sandstone was previously identified as a suitable reservoir for the long term geological storage of CO2 with the South Perth Shale acting as a regional seal. The Gage reservoir has porosities of 23-30% and permeabilities of 200-1800 mD. The study provides a more detailed characterisation of the post Valanginian Break-up reservoir - seal pair by conducting a sequence stratigraphic and palaeogeographic assessment of the SP Supersequence. It is based on an integrated sequence stratigraphic analysis of 19 wells and 10, 000 line kilometres of 2D reflection seismic data, and the assessment of new and revised biostratigraphic data, digital well logs and lithological interpretations of cuttings and core samples. Palaeogeographies were reconstructed by mapping higher-order prograding packages and establishing changes in sea level and sediment supply to portray the development of the delta system. The SP Supersequence incorporates two major deltaic systems operating from the north and south of the sub-basin which were deposited in a restricted marine environment. Prograding clinoforms are clearly imaged on regional 2D seismic lines. The deltaic succession incorporates submarine fan, pro-delta, delta-front to shelfal, deltaic shallow marine and fluvio-deltaic sediments. These were identified using seismic stratigraphic techniques and confirmed with well ties where available. The break of toe slope was particularly important in delineating the transition between silty slope sediments and fine-grained pro-delta shales which provide the seal for the Gage submarine fan complex. As the primary reservoir target, the Gage lowstand fan was investigated further by conducting seismic faces mapping to characterise seismic reflection continuity and amplitude variations. The suitability of this method was confirmed by obtaining comparable results based on the analysis of relative acoustic impedance of the seismic data. The Gage reservoir forms part of a sand-rich submarine fan system and was sub-divided into three units. It ranges from canyon confined inner fan deposits to middle fan deposits on a basin plain and slump deposits adjacent to the palaeotopographic highs. Directions of sediment supply are complex. Initially, the major sediment contributions are from a northern and southern canyon adjacent to the Badaminna Fault Zone. These coalesce in the inner middle fan and move westward onto the plain producing the outer middle fan. As time progresses sediment supply from the east becomes more significant. Although much of the submarine fan complex is not penetrated by wells, the inner fan is interpreted to contain stacked channelized high energy turbidity currents and debris flows that would provide the most suitable reservoir target due to good vertical and lateral sand connectivity. The middle outer fan deposits are predicted to contain finer-grained material hence would have poorer lateral and vertical communication.

As a participating organisation in the Global Mapping Project, and following discussions held at the 22nd meeting of the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping (ISCGM), the Secretariat of the ISCGM has requested the assistance of Geoscience Australia in the validation of intermediate products of global land cover, the Global Land Cover by National Mapping Organisation (GLCNMO) version 3. The request sent to Geoscience Australia involves the use of existing maps and other materials, based on expertise and knowledge to report the validation of the GLCNMO version 3 datasets.

Since 2012, Geoscience Australia has been providing spatial support and advice to the Crisis Coordination Centre (CCC) within Emergency Management Australia (EMA) as part of our collaboration with the Attorney-General's Department. Geoscience Australia designed the Exposure Report to quickly provide exposure information for timely emergency response and recovery decision-making. This document describes the datasets and processes that create the Exposure Report

Superseded by 78944

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

In many areas of the world, vegetation dynamics in semi-arid floodplain environments have been seriously impacted by increased river regulation and groundwater use. With increases in regulation along many rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin, flood volume, seasonality and frequency have changed which has in turn affected the condition and distribution of vegetation. Floodplain vegetation can be degraded from both too much and too little water due to regulation. Over-regulation and increased use of groundwater in these landscapes can exacerbate the effects related to natural climate variability. Prolonged flooding of woody plants has been found to induce a number of physiological disturbances such as early stomatal closure and inhibition of photosynthesis. However, drought conditions can also result in leaf biomass reduction and sapwood area decline. Depending on the species, different inundation and drought tolerances are observed. Identification of groundwater-dependent terrestrial vegetation, and assessment of the relative importance of different water sources to vegetation dynamics, typically requires detailed ecophysiological studies over a number of seasons or years as shown in Chowilla, New South Wales [] and Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia []. However, even when groundwater dependence can be quantified, results are often difficult to upscale beyond the plot scale. Quicker, more regional approaches to mapping groundwater-dependent vegetation have consequently evolved with technological advancements in remote sensing techniques. Such an approach was used in this study. LiDAR canopy digital elevation model (CDEM) and foliage projected cover (FPC) data were combined with Landsat imagery in order to characterise the spatial and temporal behaviour of woody vegetation in the Lower Darling Floodplain, New South Wales. The multi-temporal dynamics of the woody vegetation were then compared to the estimated availability of different water sources in order to better understand water requirements.

Wind multipliers are factors that transform regional wind speeds into local wind speeds, accounting for the local effects which include topographical, terrain and shielding influences. Wind multipliers have been successfully utilized in various wind related activities such as wind hazard assessment (engineering building code applications), event-based wind impact assessments (tropical cyclones), and also national scale wind risk assessment. The work of McArthur in developing the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI: Luke and McArthur, 1978) indicates that the contribution of wind speed to the FFDI is about 45% of the magnitude, indicating the importance of determining an accurate local wind speed in bushfire hazard and spread calculations. For bushfire spread modeling, local site variation (@ 100 metre and also 25 metre horizontal resolution) have been considered through the use of wind multipliers, and this has resulted in a significant difference to the currently utilized regional '10 metre height' wind speed (and further to the impact analysis). A series of wind multipliers have been developed for three historic bushfire case study areas; the 2009 Victorian fires (Kilmore fire), the 2005 Wangary fire (Eyre Peninsula), and the 2001 Warragamba - Mt. Hall fire (Western Sydney). This paper describes the development of wind multiplier computation methodology and the application of wind multipliers to bushfire hazard and impact analysis. The efficacy of using wind multipliers within a bushfire spread hazard model is evaluated by considering case study comparisons of fire extent, shape and impact against post-disaster impact assessments. The analysis has determined that it is important to consider wind multipliers for local wind speed determination in order to achieve reliable fire spread and impact results. From AMSA 2013 conference

Imagine you are an incident controller viewing a computer screen which depicts the likely spread of a bushfire that's just started. The display shows houses and other structures in the fire's path, and even the demographics of the people living in the area, such as the number of people, their age spread, whether households have independent transport, and whether English is their second language. In addition, imagine that you can quantify and display the uncertainty in both the fire weather and also the type and state of the vegetation, visualising the sensitivity of the expected fire spread and impact to these uncertainties. It will be possible to consider 'what if' scenarios as the event unfolds, and reject those scenarios that are no longer plausible. The advantages of such a simulation system in making speedy, well-informed decisions has been considered by a group of Bushfire CRC researchers who have collaborated to produce a 'proof of concept' for such a system, demonstrated initially on three case studies. The 'proof of concept' system has the working name FireDST (Fire Impact and Risk Evaluation Decision Support Tool). FireDST links various databases and models, including the Phoenix RapidFire fire prediction model and building vulnerability assessment models, as well as infrastructure and demographic databases. The information is assembled into an integrated simulation framework through a geographical information system (GIS) interface. Pre-processed information, such as factors that determine the local and regional wind, and also the typical response of buildings to fire, are linked through a database, along with census-derived social and economic information. This presentation provides an overview of the FireDST simulation 'proof of concept' tool and walks through a sample probabilistic simulation constructed using the tool. Handbook MODSIM2013 Conference

Flythrough movie showing the bathymetry of the continental shelf within the Oceanic Shoals Commonwealth Marine Reserve (Timor Sea), highlighting carbonate banks and pinnacles as benthic habitats. The bathymetric image is derived from multibeam sonar collected in 2012 using a 300 kHz Simrad EM3002 system on RV Solander and gridded at 2 m resolution. The Oceanic Shoals Reserve is a study site for the Marine Biodiversity Research Hub, funded through the National Environmental Research Program. Survey work was carried out as a collaboration between Geoscience Australia, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and University of Western Australia. Further information is provided in GA Record 2013/38.

As part of the controlled release experiments at the Ginninderra test site, geophysical surveys have been acquired using electromagnetic techniques at a range of frequencies. The primary objective was to assess whether these could provide insight into the soil structure at the site, give guidance as to where to monitor for leakage, and provide additional information that may explain the observed sub-surface and surface CO2 migration behavior. A secondary objective was to assess whether CO2 leaks could be located based on secondary impacts such as drying of the soil profile. Ground penetrating radar surveys were taken during the second release experiment (October - December 2012). Different frequency shielded antennas were trialled in order to optimize the signal. Two surveys were conducted: one baseline survey prior to CO2 release and another during the release experiment. The GPR results show a reduction in range and clear reflections to the west indicating that clay was present. To the east we see clearer reflections from sand layers and the water table. These observations corresponded with larger scale sub-surface soil features determined from EM31 and EM38 electromagnetic surveys. Application of these geophysical surveys for CO2 leak detection and monitoring design are discussed. Paper for CO2CRC Research Symposium 2013