Impact of Australia's catastrophic 2019/20 bushfire season on communities and environment. Retrospective analysis and current trends

Filkov, Alexander I.; Ngo, Tuan; Matthews, Stuart; Telfer, Simeon; Penman, Trent D.

doi:10.1016/j.jnlssr.2020.06.009

Cited by 264 publications

(205 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The wildfires started in late October, November mainly in northern NSW and the Blue Mountains. Filkov et al 2020 [19] reported that Gospers Mountain fire in the Blue Mountains started on 26 October 2019 while the fires in northern NSW started in beginning of November and lasted for more than a month. Remote sensing data provided an overall view of the beginnings of the fires, their progress and endings.…”

Section: Meteorology and Transport Of Wildfire Pollutantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Summer 2019-2020 Wildfires in East Coast Australia and Their Impacts on Air Quality and Health in New South Wales, Australia

H.¹,

Azzi²,

White³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The 2019-2020 summer wildfire event on the east coast of Australia was a series of major wildfires occurring from November 2019 to end of January 2020 across the states of Queensland, New South Wales (NSW), Victoria and South Australia. The wildfires were unprecedent in scope and the extensive extend of the wildfires has caused smoke pollutants transported not only to New Zealand but across the Pacific Ocean to South America. At the height of the wildfires, smoke plumes were injected into the stratosphere at height up to 25km and hence transported across the globe. Based on meteorological and air quality simulation using WRF-Chem model, air quality monitoring data collected during the bushfire period and remote sensing data from MODIS and CALIPSO satellites, the extend of the wildfires and the pollutant transport, and their impacts on air quality and health on exposed population in NSW can be analysed. The results showed that WRF-Chem model using Fire Emission Inventory from NCAR (FINN) predicts the dispersion and transport of pollutants and the predicted concentration of PM2.5 and other pollutants from wildfires reasonably well when compared with ground-based and satellite data. The impact on health endpoints such as mortality, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases hospitalisation across the modelling domain is then estimated. The estimated health impact is comparable with previous study based only on observation data, but the results in this study provide much more detailed spatially and temporally with regards to the health impact from the 2019-2020 wildfire.

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Section: Meteorology and Transport Of Wildfire Pollutantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Summer 2019-2020 Wildfires in East Coast Australia and Their Impacts on Air Quality and Health in New South Wales, Australia

H.¹,

Azzi²,

White³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Extreme fire events (EFEs) (Tedim et al 2018) have become more regular around the world. During the 2019-20 fire season, EFEs in Australia burnt almost 19 million ha, destroyed over 3000 houses, killed 33 people and were estimated to have killed more than 1 billion animals (Filkov et al 2020b). EFEs create disproportionate risks to environmental and human assets as they can result in many casualties and loss of property.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying merging fire behaviour phenomena using unmanned aerial vehicle technology

Filkov

Cirulis

Penman

2021

Int. J. Wildland Fire

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Catastrophic wildfires are often a result of dynamic fire behaviours. They can cause rapid escalation of fire behaviour, increasing the danger to ground-based emergency personnel. To date, few studies have characterised merging fire behaviours outside the laboratory. The aim of this study was to develop a simple, fast and accurate method to track fire front propagation using emerging technologies to quantify merging fire behaviour at the field scale. Medium-scale field experiments were conducted during April 2019 on harvested wheat fields in western Victoria, Australia. An unmanned aerial vehicle was used to capture high-definition video imagery of fire propagation. Twenty-one junction and five inward parallel fire fronts were identified during the experiments. The rate of spread (ROS) of junction fire fronts was found to be at least 60% higher than head fire fronts. Thirty-eight per cent of junction fire fronts had increased ROS at the final stage of the merging process. Furthermore, the angle between two junction fire fronts did not change significantly in time for initial angles of 4–14°. All these results contrast with previous published work. Further investigation is required to explain the results as the relationship between fuel load, wind speed and scale is not known.

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“…In terms of the historical record, 2019 was both the warmest and the driest ever recorded in Australia (Filkov et al 2020). An increasing temperature trend is observed over much of Australia in the past century with the average surface air temperature increasing by 1°C since 1910 (BoM and CSIRO 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Fires Discriminate? Socio-Economic Disadvantage, Wildfire Hazard Exposure and the Australian 2019–20 ‘Black Summer’ Fires

Akter

Grafton

2021

Preprint

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We examine the relationship between socio-economic disadvantage and exposure to environmental hazard with data from the catastrophic 2019–2020 Australian wildfires (Black Summer) that burnt at least 19 million hectares, thousands of buildings and was responsible for the deaths of 34 people and more than one billion animals. Combining data from the National Indicative Aggregated Fire Extent (NIAFE) and 2016 Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), we estimate the correlation between wildfire hazard exposure and an index of community-level socio-economic disadvantage. Wildfire hazard exposure is measured as the interaction between the percentage of area burnt and proximity of the fire to settlements. The results reveal a significant positive relationship between fire hazard exposure and socio-economic disadvantage, such that the most socio-economically disadvantaged communities bore a disproportionately higher hazard exposure in the Black Summer than relatively advantaged communities. Our spatial analysis shows that the socio-economic disadvantage and wildfire hazard exposure relationship exists in inner regional, outer regional and remote areas of New South Wales and Victoria, the two worst-hit states of the Black Summer catastrophe. Our spatial analysis also finds that wildfire hazard exposure, even within a small geographical area, can vary substantially depending on the socio-economic profiles of communities. A possible explanation for our findings is resource gaps for fire suppression and hazard reduction that favours communities with a greater level of socio-economic advantage.

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Impact of Australia's catastrophic 2019/20 bushfire season on communities and environment. Retrospective analysis and current trends

Cited by 264 publications

References 28 publications

The Summer 2019-2020 Wildfires in East Coast Australia and Their Impacts on Air Quality and Health in New South Wales, Australia

The Summer 2019-2020 Wildfires in East Coast Australia and Their Impacts on Air Quality and Health in New South Wales, Australia

Quantifying merging fire behaviour phenomena using unmanned aerial vehicle technology

Do Fires Discriminate? Socio-Economic Disadvantage, Wildfire Hazard Exposure and the Australian 2019–20 ‘Black Summer’ Fires

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