Authorities urged to try new software

TASMANIAN fire authorities are being urged to try out a new WA bushfire prediction system.

TASMANIAN fire authorities are being urged to try out a new West Australian bushfire prediction system after they ignored the Phoenix modelling program they had during January's Forcett blaze because it was thought inaccurate.

A report this week into Tasmania's catastrophic fires found the state's fire service did not act on predictions from the Phoenix Rapidfire bushfire simulator, which uses weather and vegetation data.

It had predicted that on January 3 the Forcett fire would reach the town of Dunalley by 3pm the next day. The fire hit the town at 3.25pm.

But the Tasmanian Fire Service did not issue alerts to residents or send extra firefighters to the location because it believed the computer modelling was not yet accurate enough.

TFS chief officer Mike Brown has argued that although the modelling accurately predicted the timing for the head of the fire, it was "wildly inaccurate" for other flanks of the blaze.

Development of Phoenix by Melbourne's Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre was begun before Victoria's 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. The software was intended as a support tool to help fire authorities make risk assessments. It is still in development and being tried out in all states apart from WA and the Northern Territory.

But George Milne, of the University of Western Australia, said the Aurora system -- developed with West Australian government agency Landgate and federal funding -- used better technology, was easy to use and could instantly predict what a fire would do.

"The underlying computing methodology is different and the consequence of that is our performance is better," he said.

Professor Milne added the caveat that Aurora had not been benchmarked against Phoenix and he was speaking on anecdotal evidence from fire agencies.

"We built our simulator to be high-performance," he said. "A simulation run takes less than a minute. We give it the weather conditions, we press a button and less than a minute later it's printing the map out with the predictions on it, the perimeters.

"If we want to change the weather, we change (it). We can increase the (wind) speed, and have a front coming in earlier."

Professor Milne urged fire agencies across the nation to use and compare both systems.

Mr Brown said yesterday he would be prepared to look at Aurora.

"I see potential for fire modelling into the future," he said.