Bushfires in Western Australia are present all of the time, and having the ability to
detect where the fires are and importantly where they might spread to, will greatly benefit
the Fire and Emergency Services of WA. In extreme fires we really can't fight them,
what we can do is advise people to evacuate and evacuate early.
With the help of the Australian Government's Digital Regions Initiative, Landgate and The
University of Western Australia have come together to create a new computer technology
called Aurora, that can rapidly simulate and predict where a bushfire will go within minutes.
The idea is to replicate as accurately as possible a physical bush fire.
Jeff, can you run a simulation commencing about here, across to here and see what's
going to happen for the next 12 hours? That then allows us to predict where a bushfire's
going. So if we know where a bushfire currently is, we know where the perimeter, we know what
the weather conditions are forecast to be and we know what the fuel loads and the topography
are, we can then predict very very rapidly where the fire will be in an hour's time,
two hours' time and so on. That is the predicted outcome if we were to
burn that fire at that time. Ok
The initial benefit will be at the planning level in part of the incident management team
who work with the planning officer. They have to sit down and manually work out the fire
predictions so they work out the rate of spread of the fire, then they plot that manually
onto a map which then works out what parts of the community are going to be impacted
or not from a fire. The beauty of the system is that what might take half an hour or an
hour to do if it's a complex fire, can be done in minutes and you can run a whole series
of different scenarios, applying different tactics and strategies to determine which
is going to give you the optimal outcome and it will do it automatically for you. There
are huge areas in WA that make it difficult to do it manually in doing the analysis. Having
this tool we'll be able to do it quickly, accurately, and it will be tremendous.
The Aurora system now takes Firewatch to another level. It allows fire managers to see not
only where the current fire hotspots are but now it allows them to actually see where the
fire is predicted to go in the next 24 hours. What we're looking at is the fire hotspots
mapped from satellite data. As an example of what the system can currently do, if we
zoom down, we're looking at the fire hotspots as mapped from satellite data over the last
12 hours. There's a series of fire hotspots as you can see here in the red dots. What
the Aurora system now allows us to do is to predict where the fire is likely to spread
from these satellite derived fire hotspots. So government emergency management people
who have access to mapping software can get a stream of the Aurora output directly into
their mapping systems. They can also online, run the simulations themselves so they can
actually put in a series of fire hotspots, a controlled set of weather conditions and
then run the simulation based on a certain scenario that they may wish to test. It is
very much ground breaking technology and it's really been a good partnership between The
University of Western Australia, FESA, and Landgate.
No one else has this, as far as I'm aware of across the world. This is top notch research
that is going to be applied operationally to make things significantly better. Without
the Digital Regional Initiative funding there is no way this project would have actually
got off the ground and been able to employ the people with the skills and expertise that
it has been able to employ.