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Labs team to quench threat of wildfire
During the 2000 fire season, wildfires burned more than 6.8 million acres of public and private lands, resulting in property loss, resource damages and disruption of community services. The daily cost of fire suppression efforts was more than $15 million. As early as May, a devastating wildfire that began as a prescribed burn swept through the area of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Experts believe that 2000 was not an exceptional year for wildfires, but rather the beginning a new pattern: the western United States can expect ravaging wildfires to continue to destroy thousands of acres of land and to endanger human life. In response to the threat of continuing wildfires, DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with Los Alamos National Laboratory have been working on an initiative for a National Wildfire Prediction Program. The national resource would combine and leverage components of a multi-year wildfire model effort at LANL and the existing capabilities of the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center at LLNL to predict the behavior of wildfires and prescribed burns. The program's main objective would be to save lives and property. It would be designed to provide around-the-clock guidance to fire management planners and also could predict fires of strategic interest around the globe. The NWPP would provide guidance to fire managers to help them most effectively use their limited firefighting resources. The researchers have already developed wildfire models and the LANL team has accurately simulated the behavior of two historic fires—the 1994 South Canyon wildfire in Colorado, which claimed the lives of 14 firefighters, and the 1996 Corral Canyon wildfire near Calabassas, CA, in which a firefighter was severely burned. The simulation results can be viewed in animated video sequences. For both cases the models successfully reproduced the unexpected (and devastating) progression of the fires. The LLNL team is currently coupling the fire model with a regional weather prediction model and doing weather/fire simulations to reconstruct the early stage of the tragic 1991 East Bay Hills fire in the San Francisco Bay Area. That fire, which claimed 25 lives and destroyed 3,000 homes, will provide yet another test of the modeling system's accuracy. Follow-on studies will look at the behavior of hypothetical fires in nearby canyons that escaped the 1991 fire. These latter simulations have been requested by local emergency management and planning officials to improve their preparedness for future wildfires. Michael Bradley, LLNL atmospheric scientist and principal investigatorsaid this project has the potential to help move the nation into a new era of scientifically-based wildfire and vegetation management. As Bradley sees it, one day fire trucks would carry laptop computers that fire managers could use to tap into a national wildfire behavior prediction center so they could direct their troops where to go to contain the fire. Eventually, the models could even predict the effects of the firefighters' activities, helping them to choose the safest and most effective firefighting techniques for specific fires. Submitted
by DOE's Lawrence
Livermore |
