Tag: modeling

A guide to the basics on future fire and climate

View from the Warner Lookout Tower looking at the north section of the Emigrant Fire, September 2, 2025. Photo from Willamette National Forest, InciWeb.

Science is showing how climate change is increasing catastrophic wildfires around the world, but a new study claims we still lack the basic information to make more precise conclusions about fire and its future impacts.

Warming, on its own, may not increase the overall fire risk as heat is only one of the many influences on fire. And as impressive as the climate models may be, the real work is still to be done on using the model outputs to make real-life decisions that affect our daily lives.

We know a lot about fire. And we know a lot about climate. But there is so much more to the puzzle. A group of scientists from around the globe have collaborated on a paper that is a guide for piecing the puzzle together – from the published papers and the modelling, to creating tangible, useful projections on future wildfires.

The trend in the number of journal articles published on the topic of climate change and landscape fire. Graphic: Francesca Di Giuseppe

Lead author Assoc Professor Hamish Clarke, from the University of Melbourne, says that a more realistic alternative to reading absolutely everything published on the subject is to read this new paper in Science Advances: “Gazing into the flames: A guide to assessing the impacts of climate change on landscape fire.”

“It may seem obvious that climate change is making bushfires worse, but the truth is more complicated,” he explains.

Clarke led the global team of researchers to develop a guide to looking at climate change impacts on wildfires and they conclude that it is no longer going to be sufficient to just look at what wildfire researchers are saying.

“It’s clear it will take more than just experts from one field to accurately project what’s to come. Some of the disciplines we point to may be obvious – atmospheric physics, botany, ecology – but it’s also about other areas like health and medical sciences, economics and paleo science.

“More than this, it’s the knowledge that lies outside academia too, like emergency response agencies, land management agencies, Indigenous knowledge, and communities with lived experience of fire.”

The paper attempts to pull the fragmented pieces of knowledge together.

“The solution isn’t just collecting more and more. We need specialists who can join dots, summarise, synthesise, curate, find and make meaning in iterative dialogue with others. We can’t leave this task to AI, although computers can certainly help.”

It is difficult to keep up with all the published articles on wildfires and climate change.

Top 20 countries with the most journal articles published on the topic of climate change and landscape fire. Graphic: Francesca Di Giuseppe

Readers can save themselves the effort of reading every paper on fire and climate change and check out this paper. “We try to guide the reader through some of the main currents in the scientific literature, with a focus on what we need to do to develop better assessments of climate change impacts on fire.”

Assoc Prof Clarke’s paper was co-authored by Francesca Di Giuseppe from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast UK, Lynn Johnston from Natural Resources Canada, Jennifer Marlon from Yale University, Trent Penman from FLARE Wildfire Research at University of Melbourne, Andy Pittman from ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and Climate Change at University of New South Wales, Guido R van der Werf from Wageningen University Netherlands, and Mike Flannigan from Natural Resource Science Thompson Rivers University Canada.

Researchers develop new modeling tools for prescribed fire

USFWS Rx fire — Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge conducted a 704-acre prescribed fire on April 4, 2014 in the southeast corner of the refuge near I-75 and SR 29 in southwest Florida. Firefighter Connor Bowden uses a drip torch to ignite a portion of the prescribed fire. Photo Credit: Paul Stevko – USFWS

Below are portions of a press release issued March 24 by the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station.

By Stephanie Siegel, Southern Research Station

March 24, 2022 – Much of what is known about planned fire comes from a burn manager’s memory.

“It takes years to get that kind of experience,” says Joseph O’Brien, fire research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service. “If things are changing, like invasive species or climate, or if you’re a new manager, you need help.”

O’Brien, writing in Fire Ecology with J. Kevin Hiers of Tall Timbers Research Station and others, identified a need for more science-based prescribed fire predictions and models. Fire researchers and managers can use these tools to test scenarios, teach new prescribed fire managers, and identify possible improvements in fire prescriptions and plans.

For predicting fire behavior, the Southern Research Station (SRS) team developed and is testing QUIC-Fire. The real-time modeling tool uses 3D maps of fuels and forest structure and accounts for how chemistry, material science, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer interact to influence fire behavior — yet it can run on a laptop computer. “It’s definitely a revolution in modeling and a quantum leap in fire management,” says O’Brien.

QUIC-Fire was created, evaluated, and improved by access to prescribed fire operations, “where we could measure conditions before, during, and after the burn in detailed and extensive ways,” adds O’Brien.

After ten years in development, QUIC-Fire is getting good results in testing.

“We have been building demonstration landscapes on Oconee National Forest and Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge,” says O’Brien. “We’re going to get feedback from the managers who know those lands best. Managers’ insights will mold the product to meet timber stand management objectives. “For example, a land manager could say, ‘We want to manage underbrush without scorching the pines.’”

The new WIFIRE Lab at the University of California, San Diego has integrated QUIC-Fire as the model behind its new prescribed fire decision support tool BurnPro3D.

QUIC-Fire’s developers organized themselves this year as a modeling hub for advanced forest and fire technology. They teamed up with partners from Tall Timbers, the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the University of Georgia.

Based at the Athens Prescribed Fire Lab, the hub includes seven scientists who previously created the Prescribed Fire Science Consortium. The Consortium brought together various fire managers and scientists annually at a burn site to observe, network, share experiences, and vet ideas.

“Anybody who manages land that is prone to fire has insights that are valuable,” says O’Brien. “Our collaboration with Southern Region fire management gave us the exposure to fire operations that generated the insights we are pursuing. Fire managers have the knowledge we need, and there are gaps they need to fill. There’s respect for each other on both sides.”

“The goal of the modeling hub is to operationalize QUIC-Fire and the framework of required 3D inputs that also serve to revolutionize fire effects assessment and fuels treatment monitoring,” says O’Brien.

modeling prescribed fire research

Award granted to develop system to detect and forecast the spread of all wildland fires in U.S.

Pyregence fire forecasting tool, beta version. Forecast for the northeast side of the Red Salmon Complex of fires in Northern California at 4 p.m. PDT October 9, 2020.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded 19 small businesses in 12 states a total of more than $4.4 million in grants to support innovative technology development. One of those grants, for $100,000, is to help build a system for automatically detecting and forecasting the spread of every wildfire in the continental United States and updating the forecasts as conditions change.

Reax Engineering Inc. of Berkeley, California, the company that received the grant, has a beta version of the forecasting tool online now just for the state of California. It is a work in progress and will eventually include data for fires in other states.

Wildfire forecasting is one of the four primary goals of Pyregence, a group of fire-science labs and researchers collaborating about wildland fire, where the forecasting tool now resides. The organization brings together initiatives and leading researchers from 18 institutions representing industry, academia, and government in an effort to transform how wildfire mitigation and adaptation measures are implemented. In addition to forecasting wildfire activity, wildfire scenario analyses will be produced to inform future wildfire risk and California’s 5th Climate Change Assessment, using open science and technology principles.

In order to predict the spread of wildfires, fire behavior models are run on computers. The versions that have been used for decades are not accurate for dealing with heavy dead and down fuels or fires spreading through the crowns of trees under extreme weather conditions. The goal of one of the four Pyregence workgroups, the Fire Behavior Workgroup, is to improve existing models or develop new ones. That effort is being led by Scott Stephens, Professor of Fire Science, and director of the University of California Center for Fire Research and Outreach.

U.S. Forest Service Missoula Fire Lab burn chamber, May 21, 2014. Photo by Bill Gabbert.

Mark Finney, a researcher at the U.S. Forest Service Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, is part of the Fire Behavior Workgroup and will soon have access to a burn chamber much larger than the one in the photo above. It will reportedly be the size of a grain silo. These wind tunnel/combustion chambers are used to conduct burning experiments in a controlled environment under varying fuel, temperature, humidity, and wind conditions. It can lead to a better understanding of how vegetation burns, leading to improvements in predicting fire spread.

An article at Wired describes the planned burn chamber:

Once complete, that chamber will let him replicate wildfire fuel beds by piling logs and other material as much as a few feet deep. He will then ignite them, hit them with wind and moisture, and quantify their burn rate and energy-release rate—what he calls the “heat-engine part of mass fires.”

“Really what we’re looking for,” Finney says, “is how these things transition to flaming. Instead of just smoldering on the forest floor, how do they become actively involved in these large fires?”

If all goes well, Finney’s working group will eventually code three-dimensional digital simulations of various wildland fuel beds—digital cubes, in essence, not unlike Minecraft voxels—that can be stacked and arranged in infinite variation across landscapes generated by GIS mapping data.

fire behavior fuel model modeling Pyregence research

Findings about the fluid dynamics of wildfires

That ambient winds influence fire behavior is well known. Less understood is how fire influences the winds and how the feedback affects the fire’s evolution.

modeling research simulation

Collecting, processing, and distributing weather and fire behavior data on a smart phone

A modern smartphone has many times the processing power of the computers on the Apollo spacecraft that took astronauts to the moon. Increasingly, wildland firefighters in the field are taking advantage of the ~~smart~~ brilliant devices in their pockets.

An article published in Fire Management Today (in the third quarter of 2015) covers two smart phone applications, or apps. After the user inputs the current weather and environmental conditions they can calculate various parameters and share them via mail or use various archiving options. One of the apps even uploads data to a remote computer server where advanced simulations can be performed which then return forecasts for the next 3 to 12 hours.

Fire Weather Calculator

(These images are screen shots from the app.)

Below, FDFM and PIG, are Fine Dead Fuel Moisture and Probability of Ignition. The app can harvest information from the smart phone and insert it into the fields, including time, date, latitude, longitude, and elevation.

From Fire Management Today:

This application allows the user to input traditional observations (e.g., dry bulb, wet bulb, etc.) and have the application calculate critical information, such as relative humidity and probability of ignition, which both saves time and ensures consistency between weather observers. More importantly, however, is the ability to archive and share these digital observations with other users and managers in real time. This application allows for more streamlined management of weather information, a critical aspect of any fire event. The ability to share observations, particularly if many users are archiving their observations, will lead to a very useful archive of crowd-sourced data that will be used to create value-added products, such as the calculations of 3-dimensional weather fields that could be shared with personnel to increase their situational awareness.

Fire Weather Calculator is for Android devices and iPhones.

Topofire Weather app

The Topofire Weather app takes the weather calculations to the next level, however it is no longer available. In searching for it we contacted one of the authors of the article, Matt Jolly, a research ecologist at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, who told us that it has been removed because they “are working on better options for displaying geographic information across all devices, rather than just a few platforms. We are almost ready to release it but development is going slowly right now.”

Topofire Weather looks like it was rather intriguing, as you can see from the description in Fire Management Today:

Similar to the Fire Weather Calculator app described above, this application allows users to enter a suite of fire weather observations that are normally collected on incidents. These observations, as well as the time and location, are sent directly to the TOPOFIRE server, where they are permanently archived and can be made available to users and fire weather forecasters. Weather information entered into the phone can then be used to parameterize the WindNinja simulation model, using either current observations or gridded data from the Real-Time Mesocale Analysis dataset (RTMA).

Users can also request forecasts for the next 3 to 12 hours, using data from the National Digital Forecast Database. Model simulations are then run on the TOPOFIRE server, and outputs are returned to the user’s phone in the form of a keyhole markup language (.KML) file that can be opened on the phone on GoogleEarth.

(The image above is from the article in Fire Management Today. Click on it to see a larger version.)

The Topofire Weather app apparently required access to government computer servers, which may prevent the ordinary user from being able to take advantage of its entire functionality.

We will look forward to the next generation of the app.

app fire behavior modeling simulation