Coupled Atmosphere-Fire Simulations of the Black-Saturday Kilmore East Wildfires with the Unified Model

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This dataset is made up by the model outputs of simulations of the Black-Saturday (7 February 2009) Kilmore East Wildfires using the Unified Model (UM) for the atmosphere coupled to the F1 fire model.

The UM is an atmospheric model originally developed by the United Kingdom Met Office. For these simualtions the UM v7.5 was configured with four regional nested domains with horizontal grid spacings of 4 km, 1.5 km, 444 m and 144 m with UM v8.5. In the first simulation, the UM simply provides predictions of the near-surface conditions for the wildfire model with no feedbacks to the atmosphere from the fire. In the second, the atmosphere and fire are coupled, allowing the fire to affect the local-scale weather.

The fire model has been developed for the purpose of this study to simulate the advancement of the fire front. The fire model is fully described in Toivanen et al. (2018)

Toivanen J., Engel C. B. , Reeder M. J., Lane T. P., Davies L., Webster S. and  S. Wales, 2018. Coupled Atmosphere-Fire Simulations of the Black-Saturday Kilmore EastWildfires with the Unified Model, JAMES, in press