News Archive

By Lindy Brophy

An award-winning bushfire warning and prediction system from UWA could prove to be a lifesaver.

Aurora, a national bushfire prediction, detection, simulation and early warning system, will change the way bushfires are managed in Australia. Aurora was created with partners UWA, Landgate and the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services with Professor Milne and his team at UWA developing the key underlying simulation technology, the Australis wildfire simulator.

Professor Milne and his colleagues in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering won a national award last month for the easy to use system, which is in use by the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES).

It is already making a real difference in the fighting of bushfires.

Professor Milne's research group has been invited to demonstrate the system in South Africa this month.

"We're really happy that DFES uses Aurora already to help predict the movement of active fires.

"We would also like to see it used by the Department for Environment and Conservation before every prescribed burn, to prevent property loss like the Margaret River fire, which began as a prescribed burn, then got out of control," Professor Milne said.

"Our simulations of the Margaret River fire were very accurate.  As part of our testing of the prediction capabilities of the system, we also did an analysis of the Boorabbin fire near Kalgoorlie in 2007 that killed three truck drivers and we were able to simulate that very well too.

It is Australia's first national bushfire warning and prediction system.  It can be used to warn communities about possible fires, to predict the behaviour, speed and spread of a fire, and to manage the fire fighting and the alert systems.

"It's totally automatic," Professor Milne said. "You key in the fire location and push a button.  Landscape and fuel loads are all pre-loaded into the system. Prevailing and forecast winds are input from the Bureau of Meteorology system and automatically entered into Aurora.

"Systems like this are used extensively in Canada and the US, primarily to help predict the behaviour of forest fires, though they need super computers to run them."

"Our system can be run with a laptop, in principle, even using a laptop in a fire truck!  It is designed to be easy to use without specialist fire behaviour knowledge."

"Wildfires occur on every continent except Antarctica and cause significant damage to life and property," he said. "Aurora significantly minimises the impact of bushfires by predicting and simulating the direction, intensity and rate of bushfire spread in real time.

"This reduces the complexity of fire behaviour analysis and will change the face of fire management in Australia."

Professor Milne, who won an Innovator of the Year award last year for the system, said that the Aurora System may be saleable overseas on a licensing agreement, but with some modification to deal with different conditions and fuel types.