Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Named for the Greek goddess of war, nourished by data from the CSIRO’s Black Mountain fire lab and propelled by AI, a new weapon lies in the headquarters of the authorities presiding over a state primed to burn.
The system highlights houses, nursing homes, schools and critical infrastructure such as powerlines at risk, and automatically ranks which bushfires require critical attention.“There’s nothing like this, certainly in Australia,” NSW Rural Fire Service Assistant Commissioner Ben Millington said at their state operations centre.
Many of those have taken place in the Pyrotron, a 29-metre steel tunnel with a two-tonne wind turbine that can hold batches of burning bushfire fuel under controlled circumstances to extract sterile data from one of nature’s most chaotic forces. Decades of CSIRO fire field studies have helped shape prediction models and danger ratings, but variable weather conditions pose a challenge.Despite these findings, field studies on fire are hard to replicate because scientists cannot control the weather. Varying wind, rain and humidity dashes the chance to keep variables steady in the field, a problem the Pyrotron solves.