Fire Ember Transport | Natural Hazards Research Australia

Fire Ember Transport

Research theme
Project type

Commissioned research

Project status

Completed

The core objective of this project was to build upon the work completed by the Bureau of Meteorology as part of the Improved predictions of severe weather to reduce community impact Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC project and to develop a software interface between the development version of Spark Operational and the ember transport parameterisation model.

Research team
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Dr Jeff Kepert
Research leader
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John Bally
End-user
Project details

The aim of this project was to implement the firebrand transport parameterisation into an up-to-date version of Spark, specifically version 2. This later version is far more suitable for such tasks because the full state of the fire model is accessible to the developer, along with the ancillary data such as topography, fuels, and surface meteorology.

Read the final report for an overview of the formulation of the firebrand transport parameterisation, its implementation into Spark, case studies of three significant fires (the Kilmore East Fire on Black Saturday, 7 February 2009; the Reedy Swamp fire of 18 March 2018; and the Timbarra fire of 25 January 2019), an overall discussion of results and some outstanding issues.

Publications
Year Type Citation
02/2023 Report Ember transport for bushfire simulation - final report
Participating organisations
Bureau of Meteorology