The FIRETEC model will assist with prescribed burns. For many years we mistakenly thought to keep wildfires out of our forests. Today, wildfires are becoming more common because many forest areas in the United States have not known the presence of regular fires. When fires are allowed to sweep over a forest regularly, they are often at a smaller scale than today’s forest fires. Regular smaller fires cleared out excess fuels such as smaller trees, fallen wood and leaf litter in a self-regulating process that fragmented the landscape, limiting the size of fires and keeping the forest healthy.
Fire managers often use prescribed burns to get rid of excess fuels which have accumulated on the forest floor. However, sometimes prescribed burns can go wrong and get out of control, which is what happened in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico in 2000. This prescribed burn turned into a megafire which burned 150,000 acres and more than 230 homes in the nearby town of Los Alamos.
These fires are very sensitive to small changes in conditions such as sudden gusts of wind, a larger or dryer patch of fuel, etc. But now, due to the new FIRETEC modeling tool developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, prescribed fire managers can use the equivalent of a flight simulator to understand and plan for prescribed burns and the real complexities that drive fire outcome.
New Mexico Consortium Affiliate Rodman Linn’s article Fighting Wildfires with Computer Models published August 27, 2019 in Scientific American, discusses the FIRETEC modeling tool developed at Los Alamos. This tool uses algorithms to help fire crews know where to set fires using prescribed burns to remove excess fuel from the forest floor.
To read the entire article on how the FIRETEC model will assist with prescribed burns, see: Fighting Wildfires with Computer Models by Rodman Linn and J. Kevin Hiers.
Photo credit by Krista Schlyer, Getty Images