The Emergency Services ACT special risks analyst and University of NSW Canberra scientist Jason Sharples were last week name finalists for the prestigious Eureka Prize, presented annually by the Australian Museum.

Mr McRae and Dr Sharples make up one of three teams from around Australia in the running for the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage Eureka Prize for Environmental Research, to be announced on September 4 in Sydney.

They were the first researchers to document a true fire tornado, a phenomenon about which many researchers had hypothesised.

''It was wonderful news to hear that we were finalists, it's a prestigious prize and it puts a high level of credibility on the work that we've been doing over recent years,'' Mr McRae said.

''My work requires me to find ways to keep the ACT community safe from threats like bushfires and this is a way that could improve our ability in ESA to do that, that was my goal, and it's something unexpected but very welcome.''

Mr McRae said their research found a large fire can turn into an extreme fire, which can in turn create a fire thunderstorm in the smoke plume and then a real tornado.

''Lots of fires produce what are called fire whirls, which are due to heat gradients above the fire ground, but this one was a tornado, which is generated by a very large thunderstorm overhead,'' he said.

Dr Sharples said he was now researching the interaction between fire terrain and the atmosphere.

''If these sorts of interactions weren't going on you wouldn't have got a thunderstorm and you wouldn't have got a tornado, so I'm really trying to understand those processes with an eye to better be able to predict the likely behaviour of these extreme fires,'' he said.

Dr Sharples said he thought fire tornadoes were ''probably quite rare, but given only one had been documented no-one knew for sure''.