Big congratulations to Anthony for his effort in being a “Merit Winner” in the iAwards (Australian Innovation Digital Awards) on behalf of Covey Associates on 23 June 2021.

Anthony was assisted in this by Tecoda in the programming side.

The competition was extremely strong and although we were not the winner in this segment, the actual winner had spent 2.5 years developing their software and subsequently sold it to large American Water & Waste companies.

In our case, Anthony has spent only four (4) months in the development of the Ember – Fire Analysis Software so to come second, is a huge endorsement for his work.

Well done Anthony.

For general info, the Ember Fire Weather Software is a ‘big data’ platform that helps determine the equivalent of a ‘design storm’ in hydrology modelling but for fire. Basically we take raw BoM Automatic Weather Station Data for anywhere in Australia and calculate all sorts of useful fire weather metrics at half hourly increments. The data is also updated daily at 7am into our Server with a subscription feed from BoM.

Here are some key stats:

• 1755 weather stations nationwide
• 713 active daily stations
• The weather is updated each day at 7am via direct download from BoM into our database using a custom link
• It’s half hourly increments for the whole 24 hours of records
• There’s roughly 356 million rows of weather data alone and growing each day
• Oldest recorded station has data back to 1855 to 2015
• Active stations can go back as far as 1993 for weather (1950 for some)
• The platform is web based to enable remote usage in the field and for future possible subscription models.
• All data can be analysed through custom SQL queries, so you can find out whatever you want.

Users can select any station from a drop down list and what would have taken someone days to do is completed in around 2 mins. Insights into fire weather for a local area displayed on a dashboard. We are still developing and the platform will get a facelift though most of the core framework is complete. Here are some screenshots. The platform has potential broad application usage to consultants, land managers, fire agencies and researchers.