The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Los Alamos National Laboratory have teamed up in order to better predict how wildfires might act.
Over the past two decades, Los Alamos has created tools known as coupled fire-atmospheric feedback models, which can predict a fire's behavior using ecological data, the USGS reported in a release. The problem is that the models need high-resolution, updated data to produce the best results. The USGS has gathered research and data on fires nationwide, including high-resolution remote sensing data that captures vegetation types and other things that feed fires. This ecological data can be used by Los Alamos' fire models to boost accuracy.
"The partnership between these two agencies creates an unparalleled opportunity to meet fire managers' needs at local- to continental scales in the priority areas of climate-fire impacts, natural hazards and risk reduction, and ecosystem response to fire," Dave Applegate, USGS associate director of natural hazards exercising the delegated authority of the director, said in the release.
The agencies will utilize computer-generated models to predict the behavior of wildfires as well as prescribed fires, the USGS reported.
"We are aiming to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the independent parts," Rod Linn, who leads wildfire modeling at Los Alamos, said in the release. "Increasingly available higher-fidelity data describing the fire environment, such as fuels, atmosphere and topography, enables modeling efforts to envision and realize a more comprehensive description of fire behavior and fire effects. Forward-thinking model development can inspire creative data collection and mapping directions."
Wildfires have increased in impact in the U.S. for decades, with particularly destructive events occurring in 2017, 2018 and 2020, the USGS reported.
"Unfortunately, dynamic and mixed environmental conditions can present challenges to safe execution of these fires, as we have seen in New Mexico this year," Linn said in a press release by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Gaining better understanding of the science of fire and the coupled dynamics of the fire envirionment—winds and vegetation—is crucial to planning and carrying out prescribed fires with the least negative impact."
