An assistant professor of computer science at Georgia State University has received $1 million from the National Science Foundation to develop a new computer model to assist wildland firefighters. Because, God knows, we don’t have enough computer models already that firefighters have to use.
Here is an excerpt from an article by Georgia State:
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Xiaolin Hu, along with colleagues at the University of Oklahoma and Texas A&M University, will be combining several simulation models. These will be put into a larger model for the sake of helping firefighters decide what to do to help keep wildfires more contained.
“We can take what we call firefighting resource characteristics as an input, as well as fire spreading data to perform a calculation to compute optimal resource deployment,” Hu said. From there, the model will be able to simulate how the deployment of resources will work to suppress the fire.
The simulation will show the spreading of a wildfire in realistic terms. Many factors will be taken into effect including wind speed, humidity, type of vegetation, and personal machinery resources. Analyzing the three aspects of the simulation, weather operational models and the wildfire into the larger, more complex model is a complex job.
“Even with an update from a weather station each minute, the conditions are not going to be the same all of the time and across the whole area, and this is especially true in a wildfire situation,” he said. “The weather is going to influence the wildfire, and the wildfire is going to influence the weather conditions. So, with this grant, we’re trying to couple wildfire model with the weather model.”
Thanks Kelly
