Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Music Plays]
(Narrator) 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 W.A.
(Prof. Milne) In extreme fires we really can’t fight them.
What we can do is advise people to evacuate and evacuate early.
(Narrator) With the help of the Australian
Governments 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.
(Prof. Milne) The idea is to replicate,
as accurately as possibly, a physical bushfire.
(Ralph Smith) Jeff, can you ran a simulation commencing about here
across to here and see what’s going to happen for the next 12-hours.
Prof Milne: That then allows us to predict where a bushfire’s going.
So if we know where a bushfire currently is,
we know where the fire perimeter is,
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 front will be in
an hours’ time, two hours’ time and so on.
(Jeff) That is the predicted
outcome if we were to burn that fire at that time.
(Ralph Smith) The initial benefit will be
at the planning level in part of the Incident Management Team
who works for the Planning Officer.
They have to sit down and manually work out the fire prediction.
So they work out the rate of spread of the fire
and then they plot that manually on to a map,
which then works out what parts of a community
are going to be impacted or not from a fire.
The beauty about this system is that what might take half an hour,
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 optimum
outcome and it will do it automatically for you.
There are huge areas in W.A that make it difficult
to do it manually when doing the analysis,
so having this tool we’ll be able to do it
quickly, accurately and it will be tremendous.
[Music Plays]
(Adrian Allen) The Aurora system now takes fire watch to another level.
It allows fire managers to see, not only,
where the current fire hot spots are, but now it allows them to
actually see where the fire is predicted to go in the next 24-hours.
So what we’re looking at is the fire hot spots mapped from satellite data.
As an example of the spot the system can currently do,
If we zoom down we’re looking at the fire hot
spots as mapped from the satellite data over the last 12-hours .
There’s a series of fire hot spots as you can see here in the red dots.
What the Aurora system now allows us to do is predict where the fire
is likely to spread from these satellite derived fire hot spots.
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 these simulations themselves.
So they can actually put in a series of fire hot spots.
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,
F.E.S.A and Landgate.
(Ralph Smith) No one else has this, as far as I’m aware, across the world.
This is top notch research that’s 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.
[Music Plays]