Wildfire science is at a loss for comprehensive data

In 2013, a ferocious fire destroyed a small seaside village east of Hobart, Australia, the city where I live and work as a pyrogeographer. A newspaper photograph captured the terror of the firestorm: in it, a family shelters under a jetty in surreal, smoky orange twilight. Last week, spookily similar images from Greece, where people fled to the sea to escape an inferno, hit me with a jolt.