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Interpretation of seasonal fire outlooks

Naomi Benger , Paul Gregory , Paul Fox-Hughes

Abstract

The Australian Fire Danger Rating System (AFDRS) is a nationally consistent approach to forecasting fire danger for all major vegetation types found in Australia. AFDRS climate outlooks (Fire Danger Outlooks, FDOs) out to three months ahead are the first such operational products of their kind in the world, building on years of research and collaboration between the NSW Rural Fire Service, AFAC, and the Bureau of Meteorology, with expert input from fire management agencies across Australia and from CSIRO. The products use the Bureau's ACCESS-S seasonal model (hereafter referred to as the model). The FDOs are currently available to fire agencies, and partner agencies who are involved in land management and fire prevention activities. To make sound planning decisions, climate outlooks should be used with other sources of intelligence to understand which components of the outlooks might be highlighting areas of risk. It is wise to consult temperature and rainfall outlooks with the FDOs as both temperature and rainfall are contributing factors to fire danger conditions, but the FDOs have differing data foundations which need to be understood to interpret correctly. The FDOs are created using hindcast data (model run over past times) for the years 2003 – 2017 and the Bureau's temperature and rainfall outlooks are created using hindcast data for the years 1981 – 2018. This discrepancy is due to the limited historical fuel information available for AFDRS calculations. Previous comparative analysis of the hindcasts has shown that the AFDRS hindcast period is warmer during the shoulder seasons for some regions thus a high chance of above average temperature might not be reflected as expected in the AFDRS outlooks. This resulted in advice on how to best interpret the FDOs alongside the temperature outlooks. In this work we continued the comparative analysis to determine how the rainfall differs over the hindcast periods and the subsequent operational implications when interpreting the outlooks in a strategic planning context.

ES24038  Accepted 12 February 2025

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