08 October 2002:      NSW fires  (fire and ice)
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 23:38:02 +0000 (GMT)
From: John McBride
To: synoptic_discussion
We went to bed last night after watching the news of the Sydney and NSW fire situation yesterday.  I awoke this morning to my clock radar and heard reports of ice on the road on the Calder Highway just outside Melbourne....It reminded me immediately of the Sydney fire situation of January this year:  enormous low-level baroclinicity across the southeast
of the continent.
 

 Anyway, as always we realise that in these extreme situations the relevant RFC personnel are as busy as the proverbial one-legged guy in the ass-kicking contest, despite that any information on what were the crtitical forecasts, how the models did, how this was different to the strong-wind situation of a week or so ago, whether the ensembles were useful or useless, etc... would be greatly appreciated.

 I have to go to a seminar right now on air-sea feedbacks in the maritime continent... after that, I'll start looking at the fire situation.

cheers
John Mcb

Rob Webb

Hi John

Apologies for the delay in replying.

Overall we did OK with this one with a few days warning that Tuesday was going to be the 'big' day and after that, the situation would ease somewhat. We were troubled by decent S'ly that blasted through the fire on Tuesday night. None of the models forecast this to come onshore leaving a more gradual turning to the southwest so we worded the forecasts as such although did mention the change as 'being monitored closely' (one of those dreaded alternate scenarios). In the end we could track it in on the radar so the critical fires had 90 minutes of detailed info re. its position and strength.  One pleasing aspect was the performance of the moisture in the models. They picked up the drying trend very well (though not the moisture behind the change).

We are now driven really heavily by what the models are saying and it is really hard to go against them, particularly in such critical events. I find it really hard to pick exactly when to make the decision to throw them out. John Colquhoun was helpful with some local analysis on the day which highlighted again the need for us to treat models as simply another tool in
the forecast, not the forecast itself.

As far as whether it was different to the earlier event, the temp was much hotter around Sydney (6-7C hotter) but the winds were pretty similar. We had one fire that did 7000 hectares in two days which is a fair effort. Those of you who want to see a fairly well mixed trace, take a look at Sydney 8/10/2002 05UTC.

The actual previous event was far more serious in some less populated areas (our Mid North Coast) with temp in the mid-high 30's and wind gusts >50 knots. We actually had some SES activity due to structural damage as well.

Thanks for your time

Rob
NSW Severe Weather