25 October 2017
It’s well known that hundreds of thousands of Australian properties (e.g. residential, commercial and industrial) at the urban-bushland interface are very prone to damaging bushfires. Increasing population, urban encroachment into bushland and a dangerous warming climate all suggest that bushfire risk is on the increase.
Bushfire risk assessment has been a very active research field in Australia over the past many decades. Major topics in relation to emergency and insurance applications include:
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developing metrics to quantify bushfire risk in space and time;
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bushfire behaviour and propagation simulations taking into consideration a range of contributing factors (e.g. topography, weather and fuel loads); and
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fire monitoring and fire scar mapping with modern Earth observation. Figure 1 below shows some more recent fires captured by Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery were in the vicinity of settlement.
Figure 1: A few recent bushfires in Australia captured by satellite imagery.
The new cloud-based, automated approach we have developed focuses on visualising bushfire risk in terms of the distance between bushland and exposure locations, and the potential effect of fire penetration into urban areas. We believe this will help communicate bushfire risk to the public (including end users in emergency, insurance and the news media) in a more explicit and engaging way.
Figures 2 and 3 demonstrate animations specific to two bushfire-prone addresses in New South Wales and Western Australia, respectively.
Bushfire risk to areas adjacent to bushland may seem obvious but our visualisation approach includes four key features:
(1) highlighting major bushland that poses risk;
(2) calculating the shortest distance from an exposure location to nearby bushland;
(3) a dynamic representation of distance ranges (a future version may enhance this aspect); and
(4) for the first time that such an automated approach is developed for all addresses (or broadly, neighbourhoods and suburbs) at the national level.
In this work, the accuracy of classified bushland is very important. As the approach is generic, if a new bushland dataset is available, we can easily replace the old dataset for fresh calculation and rendering. If a user seeks more location-specific attributes such as the percentage of vegetation in an area of interest, we suggest the user obtain complementary location profile reports via PropertyLocation.com.au. Each animation or location profile report can be generated and delivered within seconds with the cloud-based platform.
Figure 2: Bushfire risk animation for an address in Sydney, NSW.
Figure 3: Bushfire risk animation for an address in WA.
