INDUSTRY

Frontline fire fighting could soon go high tech. In the not so distant future, analysts using supercomputers may be able to send real-time maps and predictions of a wildfire's next moves to wildfire incident management teams hundreds of miles away. That crucial information could be passed on to palm pilots and other wireless devices in the hands of frontline firefighters deciding how best to battle the blaze. With millions of dollars in property lost and millions of acres in the American West burned by devastating wildfires in recent years, researchers at the University of Colorado at Denver, the University of Kentucky, Texas A&M University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are working together to develop state-of-the-art information technology tools and apply them to wildland fire. This team has been awarded $2 million to develop an advanced, computer-generated, dynamic, data-driven system that will predict wildfire behavior and progression. The four-year project, funded by the National Science Foundation, will use the most recent advances in computer speed and power, high- speed information networks, satellite and sensor monitoring, mathematical theory, and meteorology to develop tools to warn firefighters about where a fire may go and sudden changes that might occur, such as wind changes or extreme fire behavior. Called the Data Dynamic Simulation for Disaster Management, the effort is part of NSF's Information Technology Research Program. The team is headed by CU-Denver mathematics professor Jan Mandel, who will work with a coupled weather and wildfire computer model developed at NCAR to build a software system that will use data from the fire scene to determine wildfire-spread scenarios and probabilities. The grant will allow the team to create a system where multiple sensors placed around a wildfire will continuously send input such as temperature, wind direction and speed, and the moisture in grass and sticks to a high-end research computer known as a supercomputer. The supercomputer will use the mathematically based wildfire model to continuously send maps and forecasted fire locations to the front lines in real time, allowing a fire manager to see minute-by-minute predictions or anticipate where fire growth will occur along the fire line. The system may also allow fire managers to plan the most effective and efficient actions, for example by foreseeing situations where weather, the terrain, fuels, and winds created by the fire would combine to create a fire that would grow rapidly unless more resources are used to stop it early on. The system might also be used to identify situations where wildfires can be allowed to spread harmlessly under controlled conditions for hazardous fuel reduction and natural resource benefits. The efforts of the team will eventually be put to the test. In four years, they are scheduled to take the technology to a real wildfire. "In the past, running a model on a computer meant starting a simulation and then waiting for the results. It is time to change the way scientific modeling is done. In a movie, you may see a computer on a starship, and the computer takes into consideration new information as soon as it comes," Mandel said. "This is how computers work in the imagination of movie directors, and this is how people expect computers should work. Our project will help make this a reality." Wildland fires are a devastating force driven by complex phenomena that are not well understood. Scientists at NCAR have a history of coupling numerical regional weather simulations with fire-spread models to advance the understanding of wildfires. According to NCAR scientist Janice Coen, "There are many things about wildfires that aren't understood scientifically. There are also many technological challenges involved in simulating phenomena that change very rapidly, and in quickly transmitting data from remote locations into a model running many possible scenarios on a supercomputer far away. You have to deliver this information rapidly, reliably, and in a meaningful way (with images, not words) through secure means to people who may be far from telephones. Those are the information technology problems this research addresses, and they occur in management of other natural and human-caused disasters as well." Jan Mandel is a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado at Denver. Professor Mandel holds a masters and doctorate degree from Charles University in Czechoslovakia. Among his other research accomplishments, he has developed mathematical methods used in the design of fighter jets and for creating artificial intelligence. Janice Coen is a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, whose primary sponsor is the National Science Foundation. Her research interests include coupled Atmosphere-wildland fire modeling, analysis of infrared imagery of wildland fire dynamics, and numerical modeling of precipitation formation over complex terrain. She is the scientific lead of the Wildland Fire R&D Collaboratory (http://www.wildlandfirecollaboratory.org).