Mr Rick McRae

I trained as an ecologist at the University of Sydney. I am recently retired from a career in bushfires and emergency management spanning over three decades, based in Canberra. I worked as a fire management planner and as an arson inverstigator. I worked on a wide range of natural hazard risk assessments, including wildfire, flood, severe storms, landslides, raised dust and heatwaves. I have served on or chaired a number of national emergency management working groups, spanning spatial data, bushfire seasonal outlooks, emergency response, and training.

I am a visiting fellow at UNSW. I have specialised in fire behaviour, and served in terchnical specilaist roles on major fires in the ACT, Tasmania, and Canada. After the 2003 Canberra fires I studied fire thunderstorms (pyroCbs) and joined an international science collaboration studying them. I have worked on predictive tools and research dissemination. I have worked on key pyroCb case studies, and, working with Jason Sharples’ Bushfire Research Group in UNSW Canberra, identified vorticity-driven lateral spread and confirmed pyro-tornadogenesis. I maintain the Australian pyroCb register. My current focus is studying the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires.

I work with the bushfire sector on research dissemination. To do this, I have presented numerous talks, workshops and research posters at annual conferences.