Synoptic condition under which major fire events occur:  Harvey Stern on fires in Victoria

Hello John et al,
      The attachment is a brief extract from my thesis on the subject of fire weather synoptics in Victoria...
      (Stern, H. 1999 Statistically based weather forecast guidance. Meteorological Study 43, Bureau of Meteorology, Australia),       which refers to a paper by Mark Williams and myself       (Stern H and Williams M (1989) ENSO and summer fire danger in Victoria, Australia. Proceedings, 1989 Fire Weather Services Conf., Hobart, Tasmania).
      A shorter version of this paper was published as       (Stern H and Williams M 1988 ENSO and summer fire danger in Victoria, Australia. Abstracts, Conf. on Tropical Meteorology, Brisbane, 1988).
Best Regards,
Harvey.

Reply (John McB)

As majordomo has problems with attachments, I have put Harvey’s email, along with attachment up on my web page.

His email is interesting and attached figure on the high proportion of fire days falling within certain synoptic types is interesting.
 

We should follow up with something along these lines for NSW.  We know that the major fire events of 94 and 2002 had similar synoptics with a low-latitude jet stream and trailing front with extreme north-westerlies ahead of it, followed by a week or more of dry westerlies.

The question is, What is the climatology of extreme fire events in NSW?...a are they generally of this synoptic type?  If so, this would presumably mean they occur in early summer (when you can have these “winter-type” locations of the deep tropospheric low.

Has anyone done a climatology of major fire events in NSW?  Talking to Graham Mills (Guru-Murrumbidgee) about it, he tells me that fire records are affected by multiple factors and that the best record to work with would be a time series of calculated fire-potential index (e.g KBDI) over selected locations in NSW.

We could extract the relevant data from Climatezone and produce daily time series of the last couple of decades of KBDI.  Then we could pick out the extreme events and look at the synoptics, seasonal distribution etc.  Presumably the documented actual fire events would occur during extreme KBDI events.

Has anyone up in the NSW office already carried out a study like this... If not, we should correspond and swing in to action
 
 

From Andrew Treloar

> Hi John,
>
> A comprehensive study has not been done to my knowledge and would
> certainly be
> warranted.
>
> Regards,
>
> Andrew Treloar
>

From Rob Webb

Hi all

We were in the midst of a similar study until various things led to it being
put down the list of priorities. We have extracted data for days Richmond
had extreme fire danger and have the upper wind/temp profiles also. Beyond
that we were going to play around with data to see what we could find. I'm
sure one day we'll get it back to the top of the pile but unfortunately
others things have taken priority.

Regards

Rob Webb
NSW Severe Weather