Lance Leslie, Milton Speer and Ben Simons
This still is from an animation showing how the bushfire smoke from a controlled burn event settled over the city of Perth. The winds are shown by animated streamlines, arrow size and colour indicates wind magnitude.
On November 14 1995 state
authorities carried a hazard reduction south of Perth. The weather
forecast predicted that the smoke would be blown out to sea. However a
strong sea-breeze front and a mesoscale low pressure system,
unexpectedly turned the smoke back from its initial trajectory over the
ocean to Perth itself. The result was high smoke
concentration levels over the city and associated health concerns to
residents as well as disruption to transport including the closing of
Perth airport.
Click here to see a quicktime animation (9.5 MB) or an mpeg animation (15.2 MB).
This visualisation was done at Sydney
VisLab with AVS Express and Houdini by Ben Simons,
Sydney
VisLab.
Publication
L.M. Leslie, M.S. Speer; "Atmospheric
particulate transport modelling in controlled burn event"; Meteorol. Appl., 5, pp 17–24 (1998).