Every day this summer, CSIRO supplies fire fighters throughout Victoria and South Australia with extraordinarily detailed satellite images showing regions most at risk of bushfires.
The images provide almost 10 times the resolution of past charts, clearly showing how much moisture is present in vegetation throughout the two States.
'The images are a crucial tool for fire fighters,' says Dr Graeme Pearman, Chief of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research.
'We generate daily images that help fire officers assess the threat in different parts of the country. The images also help decide whether or not to declare fire ban days, and where fire fighters should be on alert,' he says.
CSIRO has developed its vegetation dryness images in collaboration with the Victorian Country Fire Authority.
CSIRO generates full-colour images from satellite data supplied by the Bureau of Meteorology. The data comes from sophisticated instruments on satellites that orbit the Earth every 100 minutes.
CSIRO scientists Mac Dilley and Mary Edwards process the satellite data to show the moisture status of vegetation, in a range of hues from red to green.
New computer processing techniques enable CSIRO to pinpoint accurately grassland that is particularly dry, even if it is close to forested areas.
The Division of Atmospheric Research recently hosted a national meeting of fire authorities, researchers and agriculturalists to explore the best ways of using the technology in the fight against fire.
'Fire authorities download our images via the Internet. They then use an array of computer tools to extract information,' said Dr Pearman.
Fire authorities, for example, can extract from each image the specific dryness of vegetation on a 100 point scale, from tinder dry to extremely lush. The authorities can then use this data along with extensive information from their own networks in computer models to predict the spread and ferocity of fires.
CSIRO regularly supplies its images to the Country Fire Authority in Victoria, and the Country Fire Service in South Australia, as well as the power distribution companies Eastern Energy, Powercor and United Energy.
The latest, full-colour, high-resolution vegetation dryness images are available to the media in paper form or as 'gif' images via the Internet
For more information, please contact
Dr Graeme Pearman, (03) 9239 4650; 0418 585 291
Paul Holper, (03) 9239 4661 (w); (03) 9583 9903 (h); 0419 894 427