With Australia set to have another fierce fire season in the following months thanks to a strengthening El Nino and declining rainfalls, firefighters and planners are turning to an Australian-made bushfire simulator to help them do their job.

Called Phoenix, this software is proving to be indispensable in a number of different ways, from planning fire prevention, to knowing where a new fire will spread, to helping at-risk communities develop bushfire survival plans.

Called Phoenix, this software is proving to be indispensable for fighting bushfires.

Initially instigated by Dr Kevin Tolhurst AM at the University of Melbourne, it's taken a decade of work from Dr Tolhurst and numerous other projects to bring Phoenix into the highly usable state that it is now. It turns out that modelling the behaviour of something as complex as fire is a very tricky problem, especially as it varies so wildly depending on the fuel found in different areas.

According to Dr Tolhurst, one of the biggest issues was how to model the smoke plume created by a fire. This proved to be very important, as it leads to the creation of firebrands – the pieces of burning bark and wood that are carried by the smoke and lead to spot fires.