Storms that bring fire – using artificial intelligence in Australia’s bushfire crisis

When you’re on the frontline of a raging bushfire, every second counts. 

Life-saving decisions have to be made in seconds, and anyone who’s lived through a bushfire can tell you the difference 5, 10 or 15 minutes can make.  

Even if you haven’t lived it, most Australians remember the images of glowing red skies, smoke-blanketed cities and angry thunderstorms that, instead of rain, brought more fire.  

The Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020 brought discussions about Australia’s changing climate to the forefront of the national consciousness, leaving many of us overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and how often we’ll be facing it in the future.  

We'll take you to where that deadly fire season started in Queensland: a little holiday town on the coast where fire spread with alarming speed. You’ll also meet the UQ researchers using artificial intelligence to support firefighters, communities and families to make those 5, 10 or 15 minutes count.  

Doomscroll Remedy takes you to the edge of the existential crises that keep us up at night and introduces you to the experts working to solve them.

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Doomscroll Remedy is a University of Queensland podcast, produced by Deadset Studios. 

Hosted by Stephen Stockwell. Produced by Grace Pashley, Krissy Miltiadou and Rachel Fountain at Deadset Studios. The consulting producer is Zoe McDonald and commissioning editor at The University of Queensland is Greta Usasz.

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the land on which this show was made.

Transcript

Gabby: 0:10

In the afternoon, I went for a walk with the dog. And that's when I could in the distance see some smoke and was curious but not alarmed at the time. But whilst I was out walking, I received a phone call from my dad, you know, asking me if I could see the smoke and where was I? And what was I doing? He's a bus driver on the Sunshine Coast. So he drives up and down the coast a lot. So he sees what's going on. And he's radioing often to other bus drivers about what's going on. So I think he was maybe a little bit more aware of the severity of the situation.

Stephen Stockwell: 0:50

What did your dad say when he called?

Gabby: 0:52

Where are you? Where's your brother? Why don't you at home, go home walk home. He's always a little bit more, not a worrier, but he likes to know what's going on and to, to make sure everything's okay.

Stephen Stockwell: 1:08

I remember this day, it was September 2019. I've got friends who live on Queensland Sunshine Coast. So I made a point of watching this on the news. Gabby Barnett, who's telling this story had just moved back to her childhood home after a stint overseas, she cut her walk short after the call from her dad.

Gabby: 1:25

So we just started packing some bags for each of us, you know, pajamas, toothbrush, just in case and started loading the photo albums into the car, and birth certificates and laptops.

Stephen Stockwell: 1:40

So that's Gabby. I'm Steven Stockwell. And you're listening to doom scroll remedy, where we meet the people living through the existential threats that keep us up at night and the people who are trying to solve them. In this series, we're diving into direct threats to how we live like bushfires, and some things that are a little harder to pin down, not with the goal of fixing them. We're not wizards. But we hope we can slow down enough to understand all of these big problems swirling through our feeds, which wise have gone from being a natural part of the Australian landscape to wild and deadly disasters. And in this episode, we'll find out how University of Queensland researchers are making them more predictable. They've got plenty to work with to at the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, the east coast of Australia lit up. I was living in Sydney at the time and it felt like smoke blanketed the city for months. Everything was red, I was brushing ash off my clothes hanging on the hills, hoists just 10 kilometres from the CBD. And that deadly fire season actually began further north in Queensland Phrygian to be exact, a little holiday town on the beach.

Gabby: 2:45

We've always lived in Pridgen and it's changed a lot in that time. Back in the day, Pridgen was a very sleepy little town now. It's a little bit more upmarket, which is strange for us. But um, but nice. We've spent our whole lives like living where we are. And it's a little bit more in the bush than say in town, which is quite lovely. But we've always been very connected to to town as well. My mum used to have a shop there. So we caught the school bus there every day. So I have a deep connection to print in. What's the house like? Well, I love it. It's almost like a big U shaped house. With a big deck. There are lots and lots of countries, which in turn means we get lots of beautiful beds, lots of Rainbow lorikeets kangaroos. We have a lovely garden that my dad maintains. He spends almost all his time outside of the house when he's not working. Did you have a bushfire plan. As a family, we have always had a plan of attack that if there was a bushfire or any reason to evacuate, I suppose we knew exactly what we would be going for. We have a large cabinet with every photo album ever for our family that we knew to go directly to and actually my mum had a few years ago, organized that better. She'd put it more into boxes and done that in a way that it would be easier to get up and go quickly. And we've always known to go for this very old briefcase of my dad's would be over 30 years old that has every birth certificate and passport in it. But that's about the extent of our planning.

Stephen Stockwell: 4:25

So take us back to when you got home from that walk. Did your family have to evacuate and where did you go?

Gabby: 4:31

Thankfully, we have good family friends who now don't live in prison but previously had and so we're very similarly attached to the situation and keeping a close eye on things. So we went up to their house in Noosa when we just sat around and listened to the news and had the radio on and kept abreast of the situation.

Stephen Stockwell: 4:57

Everyone was up early the next day, but the good news was Then you the house was okay. And they probably go home. A few hours later though, everything felt different. There was quite strong

Gabby: 5:06

winds, which was a bit alarming. And it certainly, despite being a sunny day, it wasn't a nice one. It wasn't clear skies and nice sunshine, it was hot and smoky and a bit more oppressive. And so we could now see far in the distance more of an orange glow more of the flames and certainly much darker smoke as well. You could smell it. And so that sometimes filters then from your nose into your mouth. And I mean, it felt quite serious. It did the first time but this time, we knew that the fire was much closer. And by then we had heard a lot more of the news, we could see that they had the the large aerial tanker, so the plane that flies over and drops water. So you knew it was much more serious by now and that they hadn't been able to get a hold on the situation and on the fire. So it just seemed that this time was a bit more serious than the day prior.

Stephen Stockwell: 6:14

But we're able to have a bit of a wander around the house. But you can tell by how Gabby describes the weather the threat was still there. I didn't bother unpacking the car. It was only a few hours before they were told they need to leave again.

Gabby: 6:27

Even though we've been aware of bushfires before. This was certainly the first time that it had been so serious. And it was worrying. But you felt comforted by the fact that we were all together as a family. Even though we love that home immensely. You felt that that it was going to be okay even if it wasn't there anymore.

Stephen Stockwell: 6:57

What was it like that night staying with your family friends?

Gabby: 7:00

Yeah, we were glued to the news. Because by then, there was a lot of reports that Pridgen town was engulfed in flames and that the petrol station had blown up that the Pridgen Beach Hotel that the local pub was no longer there, the IGA was burnt. None of this turned out to be true. But this was what you know, people were messaging on Facebook, or there were some people who were perhaps a bit closer to the scene who had put some very alarming videos up which showed the fire blazing around the town. Through

Stephen Stockwell: 7:38

the night more than 100 Fire crews work to contain the fire and the next morning, Gabby and her family were able to head home. The drive back was a bit weird though.

Gabby: 7:48

The route itself was not affected so everything looks the same. Thankfully, and it wasn't and even where we live look the same the fire never got close enough to actually, you know, burn the trees near us or to make our area any different. But the drive a few days later when we could drive into town that was certainly eye opening and you could see the real effects of the fire because all the bushland around the town had been burned. That was that was saddening

Stephen Stockwell: 8:22

the firing region only made up a small part of the 7.7 million hectares that burned across Queensland that season. We know how that summer turned down.

News readers: 8:34

We're gonna go Ring of Fire around Sydney is as angry and as frightening as we've seen homes have been destroyed and firefighters injured in the green wattle Creek Blaze south of Sydney emergency warning is in place for Swift Creek Brook fail and insane terrifying scale of Australia's bushfire disaster is beginning to emerge.

Stephen Stockwell: 8:58

That summer was wild like I was saying I was living in Sydney at the time. And I also flew to Central Queensland for some work in November. That whole flight I was looking out of the window and huge smoke plumes and fires. Sydney was by no means the frontline of the black summer bushfires, but it was eerie. In early 2020. The whole city was covered in smoke, you couldn't exercise outside and it was even hard to breathe when you were walking around in it. The smoke in Sydney wasn't coming from that far away, but I was never at risk. The people who were people who live in the bush could see this coming though. Hamish McGowan is a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Queensland and he'd seen the signs as well.

Hamish McGowan: 9:40

Well, the landscape had been primed for several years beforehand, in terms of we had some reasonable growing seasons. So there was a lot of fuel and then we went into a period where we had to El Ninos effectively end on end and then we had the Indian Ocean Dipole move into a phase where By we've also got less rainfall in the southeast of Australia here. So those two natural factors came into play to reduce rainfall across eastern Australia. Underlying that, of course, we've had this warming associated with anthropogenic loading of the atmosphere with carbon, which everybody knows results in, in global warming. So we've had this increasing trend of temperature warming in the background, and then superimposed on that this natural variability, which led to these unusually dry conditions. And we had extreme drought. You know, right up eastern Australia here in Queensland, people who are listening to this might remember that, you know, in southeast Queensland here, we had unusual westerly winds, not confined to the usual period, which we associate with the acre, but extending right through into September, October right through to December. And those winds, of course, and travelled over 1000s of kilometers of landmass, were very dry, they were hot. So they were producing metrological conditions that lead to extreme fire weather. So there's a range of processes that came into play there, that led to that very unusual event.

Stephen Stockwell: 11:09

When the fires started, they were scary enough. But we also saw this phenomenon during the black summer bushfires where they started creating their own weather systems.

Hamish McGowan: 11:18

There was a lot of fire thunderstorms associated with the events of that year. And that was mainly because the events were were so large and so intense, that they led to significant conviction in the atmosphere. And the atmosphere, in particular locations was also primed to actually initiate and contribute to that. Pyro cumulus numbers development, which is the word we use to describe fire triggered thunderstorms.

Stephen Stockwell: 11:44

So the fires are creating its own weather at this point. But from my like, arm gym, meteorologist point of view, witness Don't be sort of helpful to put it out.

Hamish McGowan: 11:53

Well, sometimes the thunderstorms, of course, do generate their own rain, so the precipitation, but often that might be offset from where the actual fire is on the ground. But also the thunderstorm is likely to produce other hazards. So you have lightning potentially starting new fires as a result of that thunderstorm, which has been initiated by the large primary bushfire in the first place. So yes, can create create rain, which might enhance or help put the fire out or dampen it, but it also creates other problems, which can actually start new fires or enhance fire spread.

Stephen Stockwell: 12:29

I do kind of remember bits of this from watching videos of rural fire service at the time, I think there was one where there's a radio call to get out of the way because the fire is changing direction. And it goes from this red glow in the background to a fire blowing past them like the entire flames burning past that truck in what felt like a matter of seconds more than anything. And so the winds would have had a huge impact on just trying to fight the fire and the safety of the people that are trying to work in those environments, right?

Hamish McGowan: 12:57

Yes, yes, definitely without question. Certainly some of the evidence from large fires or recording of impact of large fires, for example, in California, you see, bulldozers tipped over by fire, tornadoes, large pickup trucks, fire trucks. So these are the associated mineralogy that occurs with these extreme bushfires. And the thunderstorms that develop with them can present a whole range of challenges to those trying to manage the fire. And our project is to develop the capability to identify these hazards before they actually impact on the ground. So we can actually give lead time so that the response is not should have been five minutes ago, you've got 10 or 15 minutes to respond to get out of the way of the hazard. The other thing we want to do is track where those burning embers are that are lifted into these thunderstorms by these large fires. That then traveled down wind still ignited, and land on the dry ground and potentially start new fires through a process of spotting. So firebrands that's what we hope to track. And we've demonstrated in our pilot work that we can do that with our mobile Raider.

Stephen Stockwell: 14:07

The project that Hamish is talking about here is actually a University of Queensland project supported by Google that uses artificial intelligence to scour a ton of radar data to give us a look inside a fire thunderstorm, it means we'll get a really good idea of what's floating around in there. And this is why that is useful.

Hamish McGowan: 14:24

So it's a real cocktail of objects in side the cloud. And what our radar enables us to do is to start to differentiate those and identify speciation. So we can say that part of the cloud is got hailstones on it, this part of the clouds got liquid raindrops in it. He has ice crystals and his burning pieces of bark. So that's the capability which our radar has. So we can actually therefore use the AI technology to actually speed up that process of identification. And then of course, that flows through to a more rapid predictive capability and warning of where these different particles in particular, the burning parts of trees, back leaves, twigs, and so forth where they're heading, and how quickly,

Stephen Stockwell: 15:14

so it's going to make the job of the fire is easier, it's certainly

Hamish McGowan: 15:17

going to reduce the risk, both to fire personnel, personnel on the ground, as well as communities that are likely to come under impact or fire, it should increase warning times to them in terms of ember attack, identify potential risk from extreme straight line winds, tornado Genesis associated with large bushfires,

Stephen Stockwell: 15:40

so you can't make the town's and the people in the firing line safer.

Hamish McGowan: 15:43

So we're not making the environment safer. directly, we hopefully will reduce and mitigate the risk to those people should have bushfire occur. But in terms of making the place safer, that that opens a whole other can of worms.

Stephen Stockwell: 16:00

Are we going to start seeing more and more of those kinds of fires? Do you think

Hamish McGowan: 16:03

a lot of that will depend on on how our climate changes as we move into the future? Some projections are that yes, we may well see some more extreme fires. And then it's it's probably fair to deduce that we're likely to see more frequent, large thunderstorms associated with those fires that present the associated risks that we've spoken about. But a lot of that will depend on on how our climate changes, both in response to our actions, you know, in terms of putting carbon in the atmosphere and driving global warming, but also natural variability and climate, how these natural climate cycles interact with each other, but also how they respond to global warming

Stephen Stockwell: 16:47

with climate change. Particularly, it feels like a real plan for the worst kind of scenario, I don't have a lot of hope that we're going to turn that ship around, which means that in the immediate term, we're going to need to manage the impacts of climate change, one of which is fires. And it sounds like your work is going to be really useful when we start having to address that.

Hamish McGowan: 17:05

Yes, I agree completely. I mean, we're not going to turn around our impact on the atmospheric environment in terms of global warming, warming in five minutes, that's going to take decades, if not centuries. And that assumes that politically, everybody gets their act together. And there is a concerted effort globally to decarbonize and decarbonize the atmosphere, we need to be able to respond now to the consequences of a changing climate, whether it be net through natural variability, or our actions are a combination of both, we need to build resilience in our abilities to actually respond to the extreme weather events, whether they be tropical cyclones, severe hail storms, or extreme bushfires, we need to develop new capabilities to be able to respond to these events, so that we can mitigate the impact that they have on our communities and the environment.

Stephen Stockwell: 17:58

How do you feel about you know, the livability of bridge here and your your future for the area,

Gabby: 18:03

I guess, you come to recognize that if you want to have a lifestyle, and a home in the bush, which is what so many of us do want is to have that beautiful connection to nature, there will always be these inherent risks, and sadly, that only worsening because of the impacts of climate change. So with that, I think you feel a greater sense of responsibility to do the right thing for the environment and to hope that others are as well. In order to, to mitigate the risks as much as possible.

Stephen Stockwell: 18:42

Is there any comfort knowing that, you know, there? Is this work being done to better track and better manage fires and try to reduce those risks?

Gabby: 18:50

Yeah, absolutely. I think any kind of use of, of technology, or any kind of new product or system or solution is really valuable, especially when it can, you know, help others to, to better respond to a situation then absolutely, it is comforting, yes.

Stephen Stockwell: 19:13

Does it feel like enough? You know, little measures to better track fires to, you know, to make it easier and to improve communications? Does that feel like it's enough? Or does it feel like, you know, you just sort of turning a garden hose on climate change a bit?

Gabby: 19:27

No, I think that every piece counts, and every little solution or innovation can assist. Of course, there's the bigger picture of climate change. But I don't think that we should neglect the value of of little innovations as well that can can help people in these situations.

Stephen Stockwell: 19:52

I like this little pieces thing that Gabby's talking about here, I found the about projects like this actually quite comforting. I mean, I'll be Usually we need to take action on climate change. That's a non negotiable. But when we're already wearing the impact as the black summer bushfires show, I'll probably sleep a little easier knowing that people like Hamish have projects like this make sure you follow Doom scroll remedy and your favorite podcast app. So you can join me as we ask questions like, why are we feeling more and more anxious and how bad is plastic for us?

Unknown: 20:29

I think we were quite naive. And I think we've been quite naive in terms of how we've dealt with plastic and how we've let it contaminate, I guess every sphere of the environment. You know, from the highest points of the Himalayas to the deep ocean trenches, we find plastic now. And I think that's kind of we dropped the ball in that we didn't really look at it in terms of how it would contaminate the environment and the entire planet.

Stephen Stockwell: 20:56

dermstore remedy is a podcast from the University of Queensland. It's produced by deadset studios. It's hosted by me, Steven Stockwell, produced by Grace Pashley the executive producer is Rachel fountain. The sound design is by Chrissy multiarch to consulting producer Zoe McDonald and commissioning editor Greta use S