Fires in Australia have grown so big they’re generating new weather patterns and breaking the computer models used to predict where they’ll spread next
- Computer programs used to predict the path of bushfires aren’t working
- Local officials describe the situation as ‘an absolute worst case scenario’
- Locals are encouraged to evacuate until conditions improve
The bushfires that have swept across southwest Australia in recent weeks have grown so large that computers can’t accurately predict where they’ll spread next.
The New South Wales Rural Fire Service has been regularly running computer models to predict how the fires but found that by Thursday they had underestimated its movements.
According to local officials, the scale and unpredictability has reached what they describe as ‘an absolute worst case scenario.’
Fires in Australia have grown so big they’re actually changing the weather patterns in southwest Australia, something that’s made modeling software unable to accurately predict where they’ll spread next.
One of the problems has been that as the fires grow in intensity as they spread, they have actually changed the local weather.
Those sudden changes have made much of the weather data that the prediction models rely on inaccurate.
‘Everybody’s saying the same thing; and that is that a lot of the scientific modelling that we use to try and predict where fire might run is not coping with what’s happening in the landscape just purely because of the fire load,’ Andy Gillham from the Gippsland incident control group told Australia’s ABC News.
Because of the worsening conditions and the unpredictability, officials encouraged locals to evacuate their homes rather than stay behind and try to protect them.
‘There’s no sugar-coating on this,’ Gillham said. ‘There is no safe place, but there are safer places.’
As of New Year’s Day, 17 people had died because of the fires, 1,400 homes had been destroyed, and more than 500 million animals had died.
Locals officials have encouraged residents to not try and stay behind to protect their homes, given how unpredictable the fires have been. ‘Just leave,’ Andy Gillham from the Gippsland incident control group said.
Officials expect conditions might begin to improve Sunday morning when some forecasts expect rain showers, but before then they emphasized safety and self-preservation.
‘We just want to reinforce that message: Just leave,’ Gillham said.
The fires have provoked widespread criticism of prime minister Scott Morrison, who had been on a vacation in Hawaii with his family as the fires worsened.
As of new years day, the fires had killed 17 with another 18 people reported missing.
More than 1,400 homes had been destroyed and a staggering 500 million animals were reported to have been killed.
One farmer, Steve Shipton from Coolagolite, was forced to kill 20 of how own cows before evacuating, to ensure they wouldn’t suffer unnecessarily.
