Weather

• Fires burned across an area eight times as big as the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires that tore through 10 million hectares in southeast Australia.
• My research shows the 2023 fires burned more than 84 million hectares of desert and savannah in northern Australia.
• In just a few weeks of September and October, more than 18 million hectares burned across the Barkly, Tanami and Great Sandy Deserts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Why did this happen?

• When it dries out, grass becomes fuel for fires.
• For example, you can see the pattern of more fire following wet years repeating at periodic intervals over the past 20 years of fire in the Northern Territory.
• In this way, La Niña is the major driver of these massive fires in the desert.
• In the NT alone, more than 55 million hectares burned in 2011, compared with 43 million in 2023.

How can fires be managed?

• The sophisticated use of fire in Australia’s highly flammable tropical savannas has been recognised as the world’s best wildfire management system.
• It also hinders the spread of fire because areas subject to more recent fire have insufficient fuel to carry new fires for many years.

• Even though large fires still ripped through these deserts in 2023, by mapping the fuel reduction fires and overlaying the spread of subsequent wildfires, we can see the 2023 fires were limited by previous burns.
• For example, the fire spread animation below shows fires moving through a complex mosaic comprising fuel of different ages.
• Read more:
  Invasive grasses are worsening bushfires across Australia's drylands

  The fires of greatest concern to government agencies were the Barkly fires that threatened the town of Tennant Creek.

• Read more:
  Indigenous rangers are burning the desert the right way – to stop the wrong kind of intense fires from raging

Preparing for the future

• Desert fire management is still under-resourced and poorly understood.
• Read more:
  Our planet is burning in unexpected ways - here’s how we can protect people and nature

Rohan Fisher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Thousands of meters below, a smaller plane would be threading through the storm downdrafts measuring the rain.
• The project I was part of, neatly named Rain (Rain Augmentation in Nelspruit), was a cloud seeding experiment several years in the making.
• Cloud seeding involves adding tiny particles into a cloud in order to give moisture something to attach to and form droplets.
• There is no identical cloud with which to compare the outcome of having seeded a particular cloud.

A perfect storm

• Parts of the Arabian Peninsula received 18 months of rainfall in 24 hours that Tuesday.
• Being the weather-man in the chat group, I looked at the satellite and the forecast model data.
• What I saw were the ingredients of a perfect storm.
• Under these conditions, thunderstorms develop very readily and in this case a special kind of storm, a mesoscale convective system, built and sustained itself for many hours.

Cloud seeding not to blame

• What surprised me, though, was not the majesty of nature, but an emerging set of reports blaming the ensuing rains on cloud seeding.
• It turns out the UAE has been running a cloud seeding project, UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science, for several years.
• The idea, similar to the Rain project I once worked on, is to promote the growth of cloud droplets and thereby rainfall.

Richard Washington receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council to study climate processes.

• Many people are now using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to get advice, find information or summarise longer passages of text.
• But our recent research demonstrates how generative AI can be used for much more than this, returning results in different formats.
• On the one hand, AI tools are neutral – they can be used for good or ill depending on one’s intent.

1. Imagining what lies beyond the frame

• Adobe’s recently developed “generative expand” tool allows users to expand the canvas of their photos and have Photoshop “imagine” what is happening beyond the frame.
• You might do this when trying to edit a square Instagram photo to fit a 4x6 inch photo frame.

2. Visualising the past or the future

• Photography was only invented within the past 200 years, and camera-equipped smartphones within the last 25.
• That leaves us with plenty of things that existed before cameras were common, yet we might want to visualise them.
• NASA currently works with artists to illustrate concepts we can’t see, but artists could also draw on AI to help create these renderings.

3. Brainstorming how to visualise difficult concepts

• As one of the deepest places on Earth, few people have ever seen it firsthand.
• Or creating a layered illustration that shows the flora and fauna that live at each of the ocean’s five zones above the trench.

4. Visualising data

• For example, you might upload a spreadsheet to ChatGPT 4 and ask it to visualise the results.
• Or, if the data is already publicly available (such as Earth’s population over time), you might ask a chatbot to visualise it without even having to supply a spreadsheet.

5. Creating simple moving images

You can create a simple yet effective animation by uploading a photo to an AI tool like Runway and giving it an animation command, such as zooming in, zooming out or tracking from left to right. That’s what I’ve done with this historical photo preserved by the State Library of Western Australia.

• I used this description to create the following video:
  Tracking shot from left to right of the snowy mountains of Nagano, Japan.
• Tracking shot from left to right of the snowy mountains of Nagano, Japan.

6. Generating a colour palette or simple graphics

• In these cases, having a consistent colour palette can help unify your design.
• You can ask generative AI services like Midjourney or Gemini to create a colour palette for you based on the event or its vibe.
• This is true for both browser-based generators like Adobe Firefly, as well as desktop apps with built-in AI, like Adobe Illustrator.

T.J. Thomson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is an affiliate with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society.