GC081-08
Connections of climate change and variability to the 2019/20 Black Summer megafires in southeast Australia

Monday, 14 December 2020: 04:28
Virtual
Nerilie Abram, Australian National University, Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Canberra, ACT, Australia, Benjamin Henley, University of Melbourne, School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Parkville, VIC, Australia, Alexander Sen Gupta, University of New South Wales, Climate Change Research Centre, Sydney, NSW, Australia, Tanya Lippmann, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Andrew J Dowdy, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, Hamish Clarke, University of Wollongong, Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, Wollongong, Australia, Jason Sharples, University of New South Wales, School of Science, Canberra, Australia, Rachael Nolan, Western Sydney University, Richmond, Australia, Tianran Zhang, King's College London, London, United Kingdom, Martin Wooster, King's College London, London, WC2R, United Kingdom, Jennifer B Wurtzel, NSW Department of Primary Industries, Orange, NSW, Australia, Katrin J Meissner, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, Andrew John Pitman, University of New South Wales, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Sydney, NSW, Australia, Anna Ukkola, The Australian National University, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Canberra, ACT, Australia, Brett Murphy, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia, Nigel James Tapper, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia and Matthias M Boer, Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia
Recorded Presentation
Abstract:
The 2019/20 Black Summer fire disaster in southeast Australia was unprecedented. The extensive area of forest burnt, the power of the fires, and the extraordinary number of fires that developed in to extreme pyroconvective events were all unmatched in the historical record, and the fires are expected to be Australia’s costliest ever disaster. Australia’s hottest and driest year on record, 2019, was characterised by exceptionally dry fuel loads that primed the landscape to burn when exposed to dangerous fire weather and ignition. Climate variability acted upon long-term climate changes to generate the climate extremes experienced in 2019, and the compounding effects of two or more modes of climate variability in their fire-promoting phases (as occurred in 2019) has historically been associated with an increased chance of large forest fires in southeast Australia. Palaeoclimate evidence also demonstrates that extreme fire-promoting phases of tropical Pacific and Indian ocean variability are now unusually frequent compared with natural variability in pre-industrial times. Indicators of forest fire danger in southeast Australia have already emerged outside of the range of historical experience, suggesting that projections made decades ago indicating that increases in climate-driven fire risk would be detectable by 2020 have indeed eventuated. The multiple climate change contributors to fire risk in southeast Australia, as well as observed nonlinear escalation of fire extent and severity, raise the possibility that fire events may continue to rapidly intensify in the future. Improving local and national adaptation measures while also pursuing global climate change mitigation efforts would provide the best strategy for limiting further increases in fire risk in southeast Australia.
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