Applied Mathematics Seminar

Bushfire behaviour research in Australia began in earnest in the late 1950s with the appointment of Alan McArthur to the Forest and Timber Bureau. Being driven by the immediate needs of the forestry industry to understand the phenomenon of bushfires and ways to supress them, the research always had a hands-on field-based approach, producing prediction systems that provide quick practical estimates of likely fire behaviour for a given range of environmental conditions. The systems that Alan McArthur produced in the mid-1960s are still largely in use today by rural fire authorities. This talk will highlight the path this research took, detail some of the research being done today to improve these systems, and explore some of the critical questions of fire behaviour, as illustrated by recent catastrophic events, that remain unanswered.