Fire agencies such as the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) Western Australia are increasing their capability for utilising spatial and temporal data for important bushfire behaviour variables such as vegetation condition and weather. Bushfires are one of the costliest natural disasters in Australia in terms of loss of life and damage to property and the environment (Crompton, 2011). Through the Bureau reanalysis dataset (BARRA), DFES has been able to develop and improve decision support and predictive tools to better understand the behaviour and risk of bushfire.

BARRA includes hourly weather information from January 1990 to February 2019 with spatial resolution of 12 and 6 kilometres for Western Australia and a higher resolution of 1.5 kilometres for the most densely populated, visited and vegetated Southwest Region of WA. The dataset allows the derivation of individual weather variables and the production of derived products such as the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) and Grassland Fire Danger Index (GFDI), Fire Danger Ratings (FDR) and Continuous Haines Index (cHI). These are available at various Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP) to inform risk analyses. The high resolutions available in BARRA allow for detailed historical weather information leading up to and during past major fire events for use in reconstructing and better understanding past events.

DFES has integrated post processing products from the BARRA dataset into their systems, such as the seasonal extreme values for atmospheric stability through the statistical analysis of hourly C-Haines values across Western Australia, as well as mapping potential bushfire intensities under various AEP bushfire weather conditions. BARRA will help improve the understanding of weather and climate influences on bushfire behaviour, assisting fire agencies in preparing for an increase in the frequency of severe fire weather in the future (FFDI over 50, CSIRO & Australian Bureau of Meteorology, 2015).