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- Introduction
- Development philosophy of PHOENIX
- The Fire Grid
- Inputs
- Fire Behaviour
- Fire Perimeter Propagation
- Asset Impact
- Outputs
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Initially, a review in the late-1990's was undertaken of the elements contributing to bushfire risk and the current state of knowledge. This was documented in 2000 (Shields 2000; Shields and Tolhurst 2003). With the establishment of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) in 2004, funding was made available to continue with Bushfire Risk Assessment research. The first stage of this work was to define the Fire Management Business Model (Tolhurst et al. 2006). The fire management business model (or mitigation model) showed how 54 factors (or elements) of bushfire risk management (Figure 3) interacted to reduce bushfire risk for a given level of resources allocated to each element.
Figure 3. Elements (factors) of the bushfire management business model considered to interact in ways that affected the level of bushfire risk. (Based on Tolhurst et al. 2006).
Figure 4. How the bushfire management business model affects bushfire risk mitigation (Based on Tolhurst et al. 2006).
Having established a bushfire management business model, it was then necessary to be able to characterise and quantify the effect of different bushfire management strategies on reducing the level of bushfire risk (Figure 4). It was seen that the best way to characterise fires across the landscape was to use a fire simulator as this would be spatially and temporally explicit and would also be objective and repeatable. Two international fire simulators were considered, but thought to be too difficult to adapt to Australian conditions. These were the Canadian-developed PROMETHEUS simulator (Tymstra et al. 2010) and the USA-developed FARSITE simulator (Finney 2004). Three Australian fire simulators were also considered: SIROFire (Coleman and Sullivan 1996), CAFÉ (Bradstock et al. 1998) and FIRESCAPE (Cary and Banks 1999; Cary et al. 2009), but CAFÉ and FIRESCAPE simulators were designed for looking at the relative fire frequency in the landscape rather than more detailed bushfire characterization and risk analysis, and SIROFire did not capture the dynamics of high-intensity bushfires very well. As there seemed to be no suitable bushfire simulator readily available, it was decided, in 2005, to develop a new one which became known as PHOENIX RapidFire (Tolhurst et al. 2008).
The initial development of PHOENIX was primarily as a fire characterisation simulator and once that was adequately established, additional functionality was added to assist in assessing the relative level of bushfire risk. This revised simulator was renamed: PHOENIX RapidFire (Figure 5).
Figure 5. The connections between factors affecting the level of bushfire risk, the elements of the bushfire management business model that can mitigate some of the risks and the simulation and analysis environment to assess the relative risk using PHOENIX RapidFire.
A number of guiding philosophies helped guide the decision-making process in the development of PHOENIX RapidFire. An understanding of these philosophies will assist others in understanding the structure and logic of PHOENIX RapidFire and what makes it unique. These philosophies will be outlined here.
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