The Australian Fire Danger Rating System (AFDRS) is a nationally consistent approach to forecasting fire danger for all major vegetation types found in Australia. AFDRS climate outlooks out to three months ahead are the first such operational products of their kind in the world, building on years of research and collaboration between the NSW Rural Fire Service, AFAC, and the Bureau of Meteorology, with expert input from fire management agencies across Australia and from CSIRO. The products use the Bureau's ACCESS-S seasonal model.

In this presentation, we provide some guidance for using these products in an operational environment to assist with making the best-informed decisions. Operationally, all climate outlooks should be used with other sources of intelligence to understand which components of the outlooks might be highlighting areas of risk. It is wise to consult temperature and rainfall outlooks with the AFDRS outlooks as both temperature and rainfall are contributing factors to fire danger conditions, but the AFDRS outlooks have differing data foundations which need to be understood to interpret correctly.

The AFDRS climate outlooks are created using hindcast data (model run over past times) for the years 2003 – 2017 and the Bureau's temperature and rainfall outlooks are created using hindcast data for the years 1981 – 2018. This discrepancy is due to the limited historical fuel information available for AFDRS calculations. Previous comparative analysis of the hindcasts has shown that the AFDRS period is warmer during the shoulder seasons for some regions thus a high chance of above average temperature might not be reflected as expected in the AFDRS outlooks.

In this work we continued the comparative analysis to determine how the rainfall differs over the hindcast periods and the subsequent operational implications when interpreting the outlooks.