Bushfire science at briefing

Seasonal bushfire outlooks, 2006 until 2013

The Bushfire CRC, in partnership with the Australian Science Media Centre, today conducted an online background briefing on bushfires.

The briefing discussed the current state of bushfire knowledge and what still isn't know about bushfires, specifically:

  • Is what we have seen so far this year extreme or normal?
  • What do we not know about living with fire?
  • What sort of weather conditions lead to extreme and complex fire behaviour and how new research is trying to better understand what is really going on with wind and temperature during a bushfire
  • How people under threat act in unexpected ways, why some survive and others do not, and how a survey of the communities after the 2011 Perth fires showed little had changed since the surveys of the 2009 Black Saturday communities.

The speakers were:

  • Dr Richard Thornton, Deputy CEO and Research Director at the Bushfire CRC
  • Dr Jeff Kepert, Bushfire CRC project leader and Head of High Impact Weather Research at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research at the Bureau of Meteorology
  • Prof Jim McLennan, Bushfire CRC project leader and Adjunct Professor in the School of Psychological Science at La Trobe University, Melbourne.

View the entire briefing on the Australian Science Media Centre website, www.smc.org.au.