A series of seasonal bushfire assessment workshops have taken place this year following the success of earlier meetings that have addressed the potential for bushfires to occur.

As part of the Bushfire CRC Fire Weather and Fire Danger project, a seasonal bushfire assessment workshop was held for the north of Australia in Darwin in May and for the rest of Australia in Melbourne in August.

Bushfire CRC researchers at the Bureau of Meteorology Graham Mills and Chris Lucas lead the workshops and produced the reports. The goal of the workshops is to estimate the fire potential for the forthcoming season. Fire potential is defined as:

"The chance of a fire or number of fires occurring of such size, complexity or other impact (e.g. biodiversity or global emissions) which requires resources (from both a pre-emptive management and suppression capability) beyond the area in which it or they originate."

This is not simply a function of the weather or climate. Rather the potential for a significant fire situation is the sum of factors that includes weather and climate, fuel abundance and availability, recent fire history and fire-fighting resources available in an area.

The Darwin workshop brought together fire managers, severe weather meteorologists and climatologists to evaluate the fire potential for the upcoming season for Northern Territory, Queensland and the northern portion of Western Australia.

This workshop concluded that above-normal fire potential was expected for the remainder of the dry season through a large portion of Queensland and the Top End region of Northern Territory. Much of the Kimberley, Pilbara and Far West regions of WA also had above-normal fire potential. For central and southern Northern Territory and southwestern Queensland, below-normal fire potential was expected.

The report out of the southern Australia workshop will be available soon.

(This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Fire Australia magazine.)