Historical and Projected Fire Weather Variables 1972-2100

  

Historical and Projected Fire Weather Variables 1972-2100

This dataset includes the bias corrected surface elements produced from the Fire Weather Climatology for Victoria project documented in the reports by Brown et al (2015; 2016) and the journal paper Brown et al (2016). The current version of the historical data is referred to as VicClim5. Additionally, there are 32 levels of upper atmosphere weather variables including temperature, atmospheric moisture, wind and other common meteorological variables. 

Finally, projected fire weather variables from twelve Global Climate Models were used to statistically downscale these outputs at 4km spatial resolution using the Victoria fire weather climatology as the historical base period. Together this provides a climatology and projected datasets for the period 1972 to 2100. See the two journal articles for details on the projected datasets (Clarke et al. 2022, Parts 1 and 2 attached).

Please see the metadata files, reports, and journal articles for the details of the construction and applicability of the data. 

Three data outputs are available:

1. Historical surface hourly fire weather 1972-2020 at 4km spatial resolution;
2. Upper air variables of historical fire weather variables 1972-2020 (netCDF formatted);
3. Climate change projections through 2100 of surface fire weather.

For questions or comments, please contact:

Sarah Harris, Sarah.Harris@cfa.vic.gov.au and Tim Brown, tim.brown@dri.edu 

Acknowledge the funding and support provided for the various projects to develop these datasets including: Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, Parks Victoria, and the Victorian Country Fire Authority through the Safer Together Program, a Victorian Government initiative.