Fire Danger Rating - Wednesday 5 December

This morning, after I updated the LVR fire danger rating map, I was puzzling over the fact that the highest rating in our area was "Very High", with most of the Lockyer Valley Region as "High".  This just didn't seem to be consistent with all the media references last night to Fire Weather warnings for today.  In fact I had much the same concerns when I uploaded yesterday's fire danger rating map - the ratings just weren't consistent with either what I was hearing on the media, or with the weather we were experiencing here, which was obviously very dangerous from a fire point of view.

I opened the Bureau of Meteorology's weather forecast page for the Southeast Coast, knowing that they give fire danger ratings. (The BOM link ("Updated weather Ipswich & Fire Danger") is in the column on the right hand side of this blog .

While the BOM doesn't give a separate fire danger rating for the Lockyer Valley Region, they do give ratings for the overall Southeast Coast District and separate ratings for areas within Southeast Coast, including Ipswich.  Our weather forecasts aren't usually too different to those for Ipswich, so presumably the fire danger rating won't be very different either.

Overall, BOM's forecast for the Southeast Coast District (issued at 4.45am this morning) has the Fire Danger as: "Very High to Severe", and for Ipswich it is "Severe".  Gold Coast is "Very High" and Sunshine Coast is "Severe".

These ratings are at odds with the current Rural Fire Service's Forest Fire Danger Ratings map for the area, which shows no areas of Severe rating at all.  Here's the current Forest Fire Danger Rating Map from the RFS web site, downloaded early this morning.  No "Severe" ratings anywhere.

 

Just to be sure, I checked the RFS Grassland Fire Danger Ratings to make sure that they were not "Severe".  In fact they are, in general, more benign than the Forest ratings.

In future, when there are media reports of high fire danger in SEQ, I'll be checking the BOM site as well as the RFS site.