Electrically caused wildfires in Victoria, Australia are over-represented when fire danger is elevated

Miller, Claire; Plucinski, Matt P.; Sullivan, Andrew L.; Stephenson, Alec; Huston, Carolyn; Charman, Kay; Prakash, Mahesh; Dunstall, Simon

doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2017.06.016

Cited by 54 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…worse by high wind speeds(Mitchell, 2013). A 2017 study found that fires sparked by electricity failures are more prevalent during elevated fire risk and tend to tend to burn larger, making them worse than fires due to other causes(Miller et al, 2017).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Attribution of the Australian bushfire risk to anthropogenic climate change

Oldenborgh¹,

Krikken²,

Lewis³

et al. 2020

Preprint

116

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Disastrous bushfires during the last months of 2019 and January 2020 affected Australia, raising the question to what extent the risk of these fires was exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change. To answer the question for southeastern Australia, where fires were particularly severe, affecting people and ecosystems, we use a physically-based index of fire weather, the Fire Weather Index, long-term observations of heat and drought, and eleven large ensembles of state-of-the-art climate models. In agreement with previous analyses we find that heat extremes have become more likely by at least a factor 5 two due to the long-term warming trend. However, current climate models overestimate variability and tend to underestimate the long-term trend in these extremes, so the true change in the likelihood of extreme heat could be larger. We do not find an attributable trend in either extreme annual drought or the driest month of the fire season September-February. The observations, however, show a weak drying trend in the annual mean. Finally, we find large trends in the Fire Weather Index in the ERA5 reanalysis, and a smaller but significant increase by at least 30% in the models. The trend is mainly driven by the increase 10 of temperature extremes and hence also likely underestimated. For the 2019/20 season more than half of the July-December drought was driven by record excursions of the Indian Ocean dipole and Southern Annular Mode. These factors are included in the analysis. The study reveals the complexity of the 2019/20 bushfire event, with some, but not all drivers showing an imprint of anthropogenic climate change.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Attribution of the Australian bushfire risk to anthropogenic climate change

Oldenborgh¹,

Krikken²,

Lewis³

et al. 2020

Preprint

116

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These winds create extremely dangerous fires capable of rapid spread over long distances. This is a serious problem in other regions such as southern Australia where it was found that electricity-caused wildfires are over-represented when fire danger is high (Miller et al 2017) and similar conclusions were drawn by Ganteaume and Guerra (2018). Powerline distribution tends to follow roads and this may be part of the reason burning patterns are closely correlated with road distribution in southern California (Faivre et al 2014).…”

Section: Human-ignition Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…Thus, a topic in need of further study is how to sort out those ignition sources that are most damaging, how those have changed over time, and in light of future needs, how climate change is likely to affect different ignition sources and losses. For example, it has been demonstrated for the state of Victoria, Australia, that some ignition sources, such as electrical distribution lines, may be limited in number but result in much more severe fire consequences (Miller et al 2017). In addition, these fires are more likely during periods of elevated fire danger.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical patterns of wildfire ignition sources in California ecosystems

Keeley

Syphard

2018

Int. J. Wildland Fire

107

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

State and federal agencies have reported fire causes since the early 1900s, explicitly for the purpose of helping land managers design fire-prevention programs. We document fire-ignition patterns in five homogenous climate divisions in California over the past 98 years on state Cal Fire protected lands and 107 years on federal United States Forest Service lands. Throughout the state, fire frequency increased steadily until a peak c. 1980, followed by a marked drop to 2016. There was not a tight link between frequency of ignition sources and area burned by those sources and the relationships have changed over time. Natural lightning-ignited fires were consistently fewer from north to south and from high to low elevation. Throughout most of the state, human-caused fires dominated the record and were positively correlated with population density for the first two-thirds of the record, but this relationship reversed in recent decades. We propose a mechanistic multi-variate model of factors driving fire frequency, where the importance of different factors has changed over time. Although ignition sources have declined markedly in recent decades, one notable exception is powerline ignitions. One important avenue for future fire-hazard reduction will be consideration of solutions to reduce this source of dangerous fires.

show abstract

“…Fire weather, characterised by strong gusty winds, low humidity and high temperatures, results in bushfires, another natural hazard that has a major effect on electricity networks ( Figure 6). Bushfires not only burn through above-ground network assets, but electricity networks are potentially a source of ignition for bushfires, particularly on extreme fire weather days (Miller et al 2017).…”

Section: Weather and Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience and reliability for electricity networks

Cainey¹

2019

Proc. R. Soc. Vic.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Electricity networks in Australia operate in a highly regulated framework. This framework monitors network investment to ensure positive benefits for customers and includes incentivised performance standards that cover reliability. In the current standards, major event days are excluded from the statistics for outages, because they are deemed to be outside the control of the network operators. Outages on major event days are typically the result of severe weather and tend to be prolonged and have a significant negative impact on customers, but current regulations do not cover such events.The ability of any system to be ready for and recover from a major event is described as resilience, but resilience is not an incentivised activity for electricity networks and the impact of climate change means that major event days are increasing in number, leading to higher costs for customers.Without a regulatory focus on resilience, a network may meet or exceed reliability standards, while still not being resilient in major events. Investing in reliability does not always deliver resilience, but investing in resilience is demonstrated to deliver significant improvements in both resilience and reliability, resulting in beneficial performance outcomes for customers using cost-effective and efficient network investment approaches.

show abstract

Electrically caused wildfires in Victoria, Australia are over-represented when fire danger is elevated

Cited by 54 publications

References 21 publications

Attribution of the Australian bushfire risk to anthropogenic climate change

Attribution of the Australian bushfire risk to anthropogenic climate change

Historical patterns of wildfire ignition sources in California ecosystems

Resilience and reliability for electricity networks

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About