The degree of grassland curing (proportion of dead material) is an important input to fire danger rating systems in Australia and New Zealand. The past five years has seen significant progress in satellite based mapping of grassland curing, with routine mapping being adopted as an operational information source by the Victoria Country Fire Authority and New South Wales Rural Fire Service. Studies have shown that the grassland curing maps used in Australia struggle to accurately characterise curing in New Zealand because of differences in vegetation types and the greater degree of landscape fragmentation.

Scion, in collaboration with the CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is currently developing a system for operational mapping of grassland curing to be integrated into New Zealand’s new Fire Weather Monitoring System. The new system will utilise a combination of high resolution satellite data and modified algorithms to achieve higher curing accuracy estimation. The new curing maps will be produced in New Zealand at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and integrated into their new Fire Weather Monitoring System.

The new mapping algorithms will be presented along with a comparison of curing estimation accuracy relative to existing Australian algorithms.