Software Can Model How a Wildfire Will Spread (economist.com)

The rapid flames that roached densely populated areas in Mati, a seaside resort near Athens on July 23, could have been avoided. Gavriil Xanthopoulos, a wildfire expert at Greece's Ministry of Rural Development and Food, believes the unfortunate incident could have been averted if proper use had been made in advance of fire-simulation software [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: Fed with data on the area's vegetation, building materials, paved surfaces, paths to the sea and weather patterns, such software would have suggested, he says, those places where trees and brush should have been removed, roads widened and evacuation paths built -- not to mention how zoning laws could have been better devised in the face of fire risk. Greece, Dr Xanthopoulos laments, has been slow to adopt such software. Others are not so dilatory. America's Forest Service, for instance, uses a model developed by Esri, a geographic-information firm in Redlands, California, to assess fire risk. This model feeds on data on the distribution and types of trees, bushes and other vegetable ground cover, and on construction materials used in an area.

These data are collected mainly by satellites and aircraft, but rangers and crews of firefighters contribute detail from the ground. According to Chris Ferner, a wildland-fire technology specialist at Esri, even entering the diameters of tree trunks and the sites of clogged culverts (which alter patterns of water flow) is grist to the software's accuracy. Once a piece of fire-forecasting software such as Esri's knows how much inflammable stuff there is on the land, it can bring in data on rainfall, snowfall, sunshine, temperature and the like, to work out how this might change in the future, as well as how much moisture the vegetation holds. It can also take into account past fires and the lie of the land.

Comments

Article seems to get it backwards

[imidan]

We've been doing fire modeling for many years. It starts very simply, with the fire triangle: fuel, heat, and oxygen. Then we start adding in concepts more likely to affect wildfire. Heavy spring precipitation leads to more vegetation growth, and when followed by a dry, hot summer, creates a buildup of fuel. Topography is important because fire more readily spreads up a hill than down it. Add in weather data like wind patterns. Previously burned areas are less likely to burn right away because they're cleared of fuel. And so on. We add variables and test the model, gradually improving it over time.

These models are run all the time, and we're familiar with the results. It's a little bit odd to say that a fire simulation would have showed us that we need to widen paved areas or clear brush near buildings, though. Of course it's going to tell us that, because we designed the model with that information in the first place. When we model the risk of a building burning, one of the inputs to the model is the vegetation density near the building, and another is the clear area around the building. We put those in there because they are significant predictors of fire risk.

The problem isn't that people don't know there's fire risk. It's that they don't want to mitigate the risk because it will disturb the natural appearance or historic attributes of the site, or it will be time consuming and expensive, or despite risk assessments they don't take the possibility of fire seriously, or ... .