The meteorology of Black Saturday

CB Engel; TP Lane; MJ Reeder; M Rezny

Journal article

The meteorology of Black Saturday

CB Engel, TP Lane, MJ Reeder, M Rezny

Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society | Royal Meteorological Society | Published : 2012

DOI: 10.1002/qj.1986

Abstract

The meteorological conditions are investigated over the state of Victoria, Australia on 7 February 2009, the day of the 'Black Saturday' fires. Daytime temperatures exceeding 45°C, strong surface winds and extremely dry conditions combined to produce the worst fire weather conditions on record. A high-resolution nested simulation with the UK Met Office Unified Model and available observations are used to identify the important mesoscale features of the day. The highest resolution domain has horizontal grid spacing of 444 m and reproduces most aspects of the observed meteorological conditions. These include organized horizontal convective rolls, a strong late-afternoon cool change with many o..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Todd Lane Author

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The dynamics of deep convective clouds and their role in the climate system

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Scheme

Awarded by ARC Future Fellowship

Awarded by ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Scheme (DP1093148), Todd Lane is supported by an ARC Future Fellowship (FT0990892) and Michael Rezny is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (CE110001028). We thank the National Computational Infrastructure facility, an initiative of the Australian Government, for access to supercomputer resources. Figure 9 was provided by NASA/GSFC, Rapid Response, and the Bureau of Meteorology provided observational data. We also thank Greg Roff, Martin Dix, Margaret Kahn and Stuart Webster for their assistance with the numerical model, and David Packham and three anonymous reviewers for comments on a previous version of the manuscript.