 Jim Gould, Principal Research Scientist, CSRO. David Nichols, Manager of Research and Innovation at CFA. The National Fire Behavior Knowledge Base is an innovative project supported by CSRO Digital Productivity Flagship. The aim of the project is to develop a software program to pull together all the fire behavior models that are used in operational practices throughout Australia and to link that with a bunch of historical fires and experimental fires to pull together the knowledge of fire behavior in various fuel types. CFA is sponsoring this program to make sure that we are a major contributor to this national program. The reason this project is important because the knowledge base, our current systems are in a number of different programs like Excel spreadsheets, slide rules and everything else. So this is bringing them all together and will not only help the agencies to use to write the fire behavior models to plan and prepare for fire events and everything else, but also be a useful tool for the fire behavior analysts to do predictions to provide stuff for the incident management team. CFA will use these models to help us with our resourcing in the future, with understanding fire behavior in the future and to certainly help us with determining our fire danger rating system. These experimental burns are a collaborative project between CSRO and the Country Fire Authority in Victoria. The data is captured in a number of ways. We have ground observations from experienced fire behavior researchers from both the organizations. We have thermal couple loggers that are placed out in a grid pattern in experimental plots and thirdly we have UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles that are capturing video clips as the fire progresses across the experimental plots. We're also doing a great deal of data gathering as far as field observations, physical field observations by personnel also. The main sensors are thermal couples that measure the flame temperatures as the fire progresses through the plots and also we have a special thermal couple tower that's measuring the flame profile. The UAVs have this standard video camera that's capturing the progression of the fire so all three of these instruments will be allowed to measure the progression of the fire as it spreads. The data will be going back into the lab. Both organizations will do data reduction of both the fire spread and the field characteristics of different degrees of curing. We'll develop a number of mathematical equations or models and those models will then be converted into either software programs or decision support systems that are readily used for the operational folks. The advantage of the collaboration between CFA and CSRO to ensure that the science can be applied to operational things quickly as possible. We'll use these tools to help us as far as operations is concerned in establishing resource allocation. As far as how we declare total firebends how this information fits into the fire danger rating system also. CSRO is the major research collaborator. This is mainly a collaborative project so I guess we both have important roles to take part in. I guess we provide the scientific expertise and I guess we have the opportunity to work closely with CFA staff to help mentor them in their science things and in return the CFA are providing us with great support in decision suppression technology but also their research team as well in data collection and analysis of the curing across the state. There's no doubt that we could not do this research without CSRO's expertise and without CSRO's resources. Right now we have a research team for the last couple days of seven people four from CSRO and three from the CFA and that's supported by a crew of volunteer firefighters of approximately 20 volunteers with four tankers and a slip-on unit to provide suppression support during the experimental burns. We could not do this work without the support of the local district and the support of the local groups and they down to the brigade level. Brigades have been incredibly good as far as the support and being able to help us with this vital work. I guess on behalf of CSRO we would like to thank the CFA especially their volunteers for coming out during the Christmas and New Year break to conduct these experiments but also the volunteers up at Wankerata as well as the volunteers will be requesting for further experiments early in the new year. This support is so important to conduct these type of experiments and neither world-class experiments no one else will be able to repeat this type of work in the near future.