Wildfire Today

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Wildfire Today

Tag: research

Goal-oriented decision-making

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , ,

Goal-oriented training can change the balance between reflective and reflexive processes.

Emergency responders have all been there — they rush to get to an incident, very quickly size it up, and take action. But award-winning research looks at incident managers that include a third step, actually formulating a plan of action. It has been argued that the development of explicit plans enables shared situational awareness and goals to support a common operating picture.

An article written by Dr. Sabrina Cohen-Hatton and R.C. Honey, Goal-Oriented Training Affects Decision-Making Processes in Virtual and Simulated Fire and Rescue Environments, received the Best Paper of the Year Award from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied in 2016.

The research evaluated 48 incident commanders from 11 Fire and Rescue Services in the United Kingdom who had just received one-hour of training on incident management. They were divided into two groups, one with standard training and the other that included information about decision-making:

For Group Decision, slides were included that highlighted the use decision controls, which involved using a rapid mental check list of questions at key decision points: Why am I doing this (i.e., what are my goals)? What do I expect to happen (i.e., what are the anticipated consequences)? and Are the benefits worth the risks? When participants given goal-oriented training watched the footage, and were asked what actions they would take next, they were directed to answer with reference to the decision controls.

After the brief training the firefighters participated in immersive virtual reality (VR) simulations of a house fire, a traffic collision, and a “skip fire that spreads to an adjoining shop”.

The results showed that goal-oriented training affects the decision-making process in experienced incident commanders across a variety of simulated environments
ranging from immersive VR through to live burns. There is evidence that the training can change the balance between reflective and reflexive processes which could have the potential to increase the effectiveness of communication between members of firefighting crews and to improve
safety.

Fire studies at Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , , , 2 Comments on Fire studies at Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks

Above: A bison in Yellowstone National Park, May 25, 2014. Photo by Bill Gabbert.

Two recent and ongoing studies at the two big “Y” parks are yielding results about fire behavior and the effects of naturally occurring fire. The excerpts below are both from Phys.org.

The first is about allowing wildfires to burn at Yosemite National Park, rather than suppressing them:

An unprecedented 40-year experiment in a 40,000-acre valley of Yosemite National Park strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.

After a three-year, on-the-ground assessment of the park’s Illilouette Creek basin, University of California, Berkeley researchers concluded that a strategy dating to 1973 of managing wildfires with minimal suppression and almost no preemptive, so-called prescribed burns has created a landscape more resistant to catastrophic fire, with more diverse vegetation and forest structure and increased water storage, mostly in the form of meadows in areas cleared by fires.

“When fire is not suppressed, you get all these benefits: increased stream flow, increased downstream water availability, increased soil moisture, which improves habitat for the plants within the watershed. And it increases the drought resistance of the remaining trees and also increases the fire resilience because you have created these natural firebreaks,” said Gabrielle Boisramé, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and first author of the study…

The next article covers a study into the fire behavior of this summer’s fires that spread through the footprints of the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park.

…”Largely up until this point, fire has not necessarily carried well through the ’88 fire scars,” Yellowstone fire ecologist Becky Smith said. “I mean, it definitely has before, but it usually takes very specific conditions, like high winds or a very specific fuel bed. But this year, we’re definitely seeing it burn much more readily in the ’88 fire scars.”

The park has called in a special federal team that studies fire behavior to find out why.

“We’re trying to use it as a good learning opportunity to try and really narrow our focus on how and when the ’88 fire scars will burn,” Smith said. The 1988 wildfires burned 36 percent of the park.

It’s the first time Yellowstone has used the special team’s services, she said.

The 13-member team is studying two fires burning in the 1988 fire scar. It has deployed special heat-resistant equipment with sensors, cameras and other instruments to measure things like temperature and wind where the fires are burning…

Researchers study how to reduce soot produced by agricultural fires

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 1 Comment on Researchers study how to reduce soot produced by agricultural fires
agricultural burning smoke
Smoke plume from the burning of wheat residue on the Nez Perce Reservation. The field was burned using a head fire. The dark color of the smoke plume indicates high soot content. Photo by Emily Lincoln.

The production cycle of cereal crops and grasses in many areas of the United States includes burning fields of post-harvest residue such as wheat stubble. Like smoke from forest fires, smoke produced by agricultural burning can have harmful effects on public health.

The U.S. Forest Service and the Washington State Department of Ecology conducted a study to determine the effects different ignition tactics had on the smoke produced by agricultural burning of wheat residue.

agricultural burning smoke
Smoke plume from the burning of wheat residue north of Walla Walla, Washington. The field was burned using a backing fire. The light color of the smoke plume indicates low soot content. Photo by Emily Lincoln.

They found that smoke plumes produced from burning wheat residue using head fires contained more soot than plumes produced using backing fires.

Soot particles are black aerosols composed primarily of elemental carbon. The World Health Organization reports that soot particles may have significantly greater negative health impacts than other particle types found in smoke and air pollution since these particles can act as a carrier for toxic combustion-derived chemicals.

NIST seeks help studying embers

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 2 Comments on NIST seeks help studying embers

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is beginning a study to help determine how wildfires spread through a Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). Many studies have found that structures are primarily ignited during a wildfire by burning embers that are lofted into the air and then land on or near buildings.

Without research, NIST says, building codes and standards do not provide adequate protection to structures within the WUI. More specifically, codes and standards do not adequately address the range of exposures during a WUI fire – especially firebrand or ember exposures.

Emberometer

NIST intends to develop a device which will help them learn more about burning embers. They are calling this instrument a “emberometer”. During the next two years, the researchers plan to fabricate and test an “emberometer” design developed for laboratory settings. Once initial testing is complete, a new design will be developed for an “emberometer” that can be used in controlled field experiments and actual WUI fire events (i.e., outside of the laboratory setting). Once fabrication for the “outdoor emberometer” is completed, NIST will identify field teams that can employ the instrument to collect exposure information on firebrands (embers) during field studies, and initial data collection to characterize firebrand (ember) exposure can begin.

How you can help

Fire photographers who have taken photographs of WUI fires with significant firebrand activity are encouraged to share their pictures and videos for analysis. If you are interested, contact Erica Kuligowski at erica.kuligowski@nist.gov or 301-975-2309 for guidelines.

Impressive convection column on Pioneer Fire is being studied by researchers

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , , ,

Above: The photo above was taken from the research aircraft August 30 by Nick Guy of the University of Wyoming’s Atmospheric Science department.

The Fire Weather Research Laboratory from San Jose State University is conducting research from an aircraft flying over the Pioneer Fire in central Idaho. Today using N2UW, a twin engine 1977 Beech 200T King Air, they flew for over three hours at 27,000 feet studying the fire for the RaDFire project.

The aircraft is outfitted with a ton of instruments including Doppler radar. Craig Clements, Associate Professor in the Meteorology Dept. at SJSU, described it for us:

The radar is called the Wyoming Cloud Radar (WCR). It’s on the aircraft, points up, down, and down-forward to get horizontal winds and vertical winds. The goal of the RadFIRE (Rapid Deployments to Wildfires Campaign) is to get data on plume dynamics from ground based mobile Doppler Lidar. But we were awarded 10 flight hours to test the WCR to see if it works in smoke plumes. And it does so well, more than we can imagine!

The group has been known to fly through the convection column. I’ve done that a few times and it’s an interesting experience — it can get a little turbulent, as you might expect.

On Monday they said the top of the pyrocumulus cloud over the fire topped out above 30,000 feet. In Tuesday’s photos it was at about 25,000 feet but toward the end of the day the top got up to at least 32,000 feet, Mr. Clements said.

The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and it’s being led by San Jose State University. Other collaborators on the project are David Kingsmill at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Wyoming King Air team.

Since it started on July 18 the Pioneer Fire has burned over 140,000 acres.

This last photo of the convection column was not taken by the researchers. It was shot by Steve Botti in Stanley on August 29, more than 20 miles away from the fire.

Pioneer Fire
Pioneer Fire, as seen from Stanley August 29, 2016. Via Mike Warren.

Researchers predict impacts of wildfire smoke after climate change

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , ,

Above: Illustration from Harvard/Yale paper about the impacts of wildfire smoke following climate change. The colors indicate the number of smoke waves based on the primary smoke wave definition (cutoff= 6 μg/m3). The map on the left represents the present day (based on 2004-2009 data). The map on the right represents the future under climate change (based on projected data for the years 2046-2051). 

(Originally published at 11:39 a.m. MDT August 16, 2016; edited at 6 p.m. MDT August 17 to include this link to the research paper. We contacted the author and asked for a copy of the document, which we now have on our website for our readers.)

Researchers at Harvard and Yale Universities have written a paper predicting the quantities of wildfire smoke that will be impacting residents of the United States in the years 2046 through 2051. Unfortunately it will cost you $40 to get a copy of the complete results of their research. Open Access to publically funded research is apparently not a priority at Harvard and Yale. (UPDATE: on August 17 we obtained a copy of the paper from one of the authors. But it would still cost $40 to buy it from the journal.)

The information here is obtained from the abstract and one document with supplementary material that was available.

To identify the highest-risk areas, the team used a fire prediction model and advanced atmospheric modeling to separate pollution caused by wildfires from other pollution sources and track the likely movement of smoke. The authors estimate that under future climate change, more than 82 million individuals will experience a 57 percent and 31 percent increase in the frequency and intensity, respectively, of Smoke Waves, which they define as ≥2 consecutive days with high wildfire-specific PM2.5.

Northern California, Western Oregon and the Great Plains are likely to suffer the highest exposure to wildfire smoke in the future. Results point to the potential health impacts of increasing wildfire activity on large numbers of people in a warming climate and the need to establish or modify U.S. wildfire management and evacuation programs in high-risk regions. The study also adds to the growing literature arguing that extreme events in a changing climate could have significant consequences for human health.

A call to Loretta J. Mickley, one of the authors, to ask about access to the publically funded research, was not immediately returned. UPDATE, August 17, 2016: Ms. Mickley did call the following day, and said she was disappointed that Harvard chose a non-Open Access journal in which to place the paper. She said she will send us a copy of the paper and it will also be posted on her web site in the next day or two. We will link to it later. The research was funded, she said, by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. In our opinion government agencies that fund research should only do so if the findings are made public at no additional charge.

(UPDATE: we found the paper on Ms. Mickley’s web site and downloaded it.)

The paper’s authors are J.C. Liu, L.J. Mickley, M.P Sulprizio, et al.