How heat and drought turned Australia into a tinderbox by ABC News Digital Storytelling team

While the world watched on in horror as Australia burned, ABC News Story Lab was working to convey the immense impact of the 2019-20 bushfires. To do this we turned to the only resource capable of comprehensively capturing the scale of this tragedy — satellite imagery.

Over the preceding six months, we used sources from two satellites to gather more than 600 gigabytes of imagery to be analysed. We designed a unique way to translate these into a dramatic visual reference, which was both accurate and compelling and combined them with a custom visual storytelling format to tell the definitive story of how extreme temperatures drove this unprecedented disaster.

It resulted in a piece of content that did justice to the emotional impact of the fires, while still standing up to the journalistic demands of rigour and accuracy.

One of the key challenges of this story was learning to use the Short Range Infrared Imagery, to accurately create images of the damage. Traditionally journalists have relied on satellite imaging experts to do this work, but in order to be able to tell a piece of this scope while the fires were still burning we needed to learn how to accurately create this imagery ourselves.

This involved tailoring scripts in the EO Sentinal Browser, and a time-consuming process of manipulation and verification.

This was especially important as it allowed us to translate that imagery into a dramatic visual reference, which was both accurate and compelling. Translating imagery, which is designed for research and visualisation, while retaining the accuracy was the key challenge in creating a piece that did justice to the emotional impact of the fires, while still standing up to the journalistic demands of rigour and accuracy.

The story was published as fires still burned around the country, and Australians were still grappling with what had unfolded and what it meant for the future.

It was shared widely both locally and internationally, and offered Australians an outlet for the emotional toll the summer had taken.

It was also highly praised by members of the satellite imaging community, including the Copernicus Mission which launched the Sentinel Satellites into orbit.