The 2019–2020 summer wildfire event on the east coast of Australia was a series of major wildfires occurring from November 2019 to end of January 2020 across the states of Queensland, New South Wales (NSW), Victoria and South Australia. The wildfires were unprecedent in scope and the extensive character of the wildfires caused smoke pollutants to be transported not only to New Zealand, but also across the Pacific Ocean to South America. At the peak of the wildfires, smoke plumes were injected into the stratosphere at a height of up to 25 km and hence transported across the globe. The meteorological and air quality Weather Research and Forecasting with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) model is used together with the air quality monitoring data collected during the bushfire period and remote sensing data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellites to determine the extent of the wildfires, the pollutant transport and their impacts on air quality and health of the exposed population in NSW. The results showed that the WRF-Chem model using Fire Emission Inventory (FINN) from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to simulate the dispersion and transport of pollutants from wildfires predicted the daily concentration of PM_2.5 having the correlation (R²) and index of agreement (IOA) from 0.6 to 0.75 and 0.61 to 0.86, respectively, when compared with the ground-based data. The impact on health endpoints such as mortality and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases hospitalizations across the modelling domain was then estimated. The estimated health impact on each of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census districts (SA4) of New South Wales was calculated based on epidemiological assumptions of the impact function and incidence rate data from the 2016 ABS and NSW Department of Health statistical health records. Summing up all SA4 census district results over NSW, we estimated that there were 247 (CI: 89, 409) premature deaths, 437 (CI: 81, 984) cardiovascular diseases hospitalizations and 1535 (CI: 493, 2087) respiratory diseases hospitalizations in NSW over the period from 1 November 2019 to 8 January 2020. The results are comparable with a previous study based only on observation data, but the results in this study provide much more spatially and temporally detailed data with regard to the health impact from the summer 2019–2020 wildfires.

This paper presents the development of high-performance wireless sensor networks for local monitoring of air pollution. The proposed system, enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), is based on low-cost sensors collocated in a redundant configuration for collecting and transferring air quality data. Reliability and accuracy of the monitoring system are enhanced by using extended fractional-order Kalman filtering (EFKF) for data assimilation and recovery of the missing information. Its effectiveness is verified through monitoring particulate matters at a suburban site during the wildfire season 2019–2020 and the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown period. The proposed approach is of interest to achieve microclimate responsiveness in a local area.

This paper presents an Internet of Things-enabled low-cost wireless sensor network with newly-developed dependable schemes to improve reliability for monitoring air quality in suburban areas. The system features sensing units for router communications with energy savings from dynamic conservation. Based on the reliability function and mean time to failure, a continuous time Markov chain model is used to analyze the monitoring performance. The proposed dependable monitoring network is shown to achieve high availability with regards to energy consumption and data assurance with the survival probability of over 80% during a minimum period of 72-hour operation for monitoring air quality in a suburb. Distributions of fine particle concentrations studied over a 6-month period demonstrate feasibility of the developed system in its high correlations to benchmark monitoring stations with the Pearson’s coefficients obtained at 0.903 and 0.817 respectively for PM2.5 and PM10. Statistical analysis is conducted for performance evaluation in association with two extreme events, one with bushfires and the other with pandemic lockdown. The results obtained indicate enhancements in reliability and accuracy of the colocated dependable low-cost sensors network proposed for wireless monitoring of air quality in urban conditions.

Unmanned aerial vehicles are being used increasingly in a variety of applications. They are more and more often operating in close proximity to people and equipment. This necessitates ensuring maximum stability and flight safety. A fundamental step to achieving this goal is timely and effective diagnosis of possible defects. Popular data-based methods require a large amount of data collected during flights in various conditions. This paper describes an open PADRE database of such measurements for the detection and classification of the most common faults - multirotor propeller failures. It presents the procedure of data acquisition, the structure of the repository and ways to use the various types of data contained therein. The repository enables research on drone fault detection to be undertaken without time-consuming preparation of measurement data. The database is available on GitHub at https://github.com/AeroLabPUT/UAV_measurement_data. The article also introduces new and universal quality indicators for evaluating classifiers with non-uniform parameters, are proposed. They allow comparison of methods tested for a variety of fault classes and with different processing times.

Dust storms and wildfires occur frequently in south-eastern Australia. Their effects on the ecology, environment and population exposure have been the focus of many studies recently. Dust storms do not emit ground-sequestered carbon, but wildfires emit significant quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. However, both natural events promote phytoplankton growth in water bodies because carbon, and other trace elements such as iron, deposit on the surface water of oceans. Carbon dioxide is reabsorbed by phytoplankton via photosynthesis. The carbon balance cycle due to dust storms and wildfires is not well known. Recent studies on the carbon emission of the 2019–2020 summer wildfires in eastern Australia indicated that this megafire event emitted approximately 715 million tonnes of CO₂ (195 Tg C) into the atmosphere from burned forest areas. This study focusses on the association of dust storms and wildfires in southeastern Australia with phytoplankton growth in the Tasman Sea due to the February 2019 dust storm event and the 2019–2020 Black Summer wildfires. Central Australia and western New South Wales were the sources of the dust storm emission (11 to 16 February 2019), and the Black Summer wildfires occurred along the coast of New South Wales and Victoria (from early November 2019 to early January 2020). The WRF-Chem model is used for dust storm simulation with the AFWA (Air Force Weather Agency of the US) dust emission version of the GOCART model, and the WRF-Chem model is used for wildfire simulation with FINN (Fire Emission Inventory from NCAR) emission data. The results show the similarities and differences in the deposition of particulate matter, phytoplankton growth and carbon reabsorption patterns in the Tasman Sea from these events. A higher rate of deposition of PM_2.5 on the ocean surface corresponds to a higher rate of phytoplankton growth. Using the WRF-Chem model, during the 5-day dust storm event in February 2019, approximately ~1230 tons of total dust was predicted to have been deposited in the Tasman Sea, while ~132,000 tons of PM₁₀ was deposited in the early stage of the wildfires from 1 to 8 November 2019.

Observations of air pollution have become an increasing concern for authorities and citizens due to emissions from population growth and urbanization. In this regard, low-cost wireless sensor networks have emerged as a popular, cost-effective solution for monitoring and estimation of air pollutant levels in local areas. Due to environmental vulnerability, ensuring the required performance and reliability of these sensing devices remains an open problem. This paper presents the development of a dependable Dempster-Shafer inference (DDSI) framework based on evidence theory for colocated low-cost sensors for air quality monitoring. This approach facilitates fault detection and accounts for uncertainty to enhance the performance of the sensor network. A switching mechanism is employed in the inference layer to select the most reliable information based on the probability of the current operational status of sensors, thereby leveraging the resilience and data integrity of the monitoring system. The proposed method is comprehensively validated in both laboratory and real-world settings. The DDSI framework is then tested in monitoring humidity, temperature and particulate matters in the suburbs. The results are benchmarked with data collected from state-run air quality monitoring stations. Statistical analysis is conducted to show the accuracy of the proposed framework and a high alignment with station observations, achieving an R² of up to 0.918 for meteorological parameters and 0.892 for fine particles (PM_2.5).