Wildland fires continue to pose risk to lives and property and thus practitioners and scientists continue to work to gain better understanding and ability to predict their behavior.  Simultaneously, wildland fire decision makers are working towards more proactive approaches to managing the risk of wildfire, such as fuels treatments and prescribed fire.  Executing such measures requires the ability to explore the ramification of such treatments as well as ensure that prescribed fires will meet their objectives.  Experiments and observations have demonstrated that the two-way feedbacks between fires and atmosphere play critical roles in determining how fires spread or if they spread.  Advancements in computing and numerical modeling have generated new opportunities for the use of models that couple process-based wildfire models to atmospheric hydrodynamics models.  These process-based coupled fire/atmosphere models, which simulate critical processes such as heat transfer, buoyancy-induced flows and vegetation aerodynamic drag, are not practical for operational faster-than-real-time fire prediction due to their computational and data requirements.  However, these process-based coupled fire-atmosphere models make it possible to represent many of the fire-atmosphere feedbacks and thus have the potential to complement experiments, add perspective to observations, bridge between idealized-fire scenarios and more complex and realistic landscape fire scenarios, allow for sensitivity analysis that is impractical through observations and pose new hypothesis that can be tested experimentally.  Additionally, coupled wildfire/atmosphere modeling opens new possibilities for understanding the sometime counterintuitive impacts of fuel management and exploring the implications of various prescribed fire tactics.  Certainly, there need to be continued efforts to validate the results from these numerical investigations, but, even so, they suggest relationships, interactions and phenomenology that should be considered in the context of the interpretation of observations, design of fire behavior experiments, development of new operational models and even risk management.  Although coupled wildfire/atmosphere modeling started by leveraging high performance computing basis, the understanding that has been developed through initial efforts is now enabling the development of faster running tools.  Both faster-running and high fidelity coupled wildfire/atmosphere tools have the opportunity to begin supporting proactive decisions in different ways.

Rod Linn, PhD.

Expert in solving and modeling problems involving complex thermal, mechanical, and fluid dynamics systems, including wildfire behavior modeling.

Wildfires modify land surface characteristics, such as vegetation composition, soil carbon, surface albedo, with significant consequences for regional carbon, water, and energy cycles. Wildfires globally emit 1~2 PgC yr-1 and dust and aerosols that can alter regional climate and air quality. While greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change, other toxic species and airborne particulate matter from wildfires lead to substantial health hazards, including elevated premature mortality. However, predictive modeling of wildfires activities at large scale is challenging due to limited understanding of human, climate, and ecosystem controls on fire number, fire size, and burned area. Dr. Qing Zhu will share recent progress on wildfire spatial-temporal modeling and risk assessment under both present-day conditions and under future projected climate scenarios.

Qing Zhu

Qing Zhu is a Research Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, working on earth system model development and analysis. He is one of the major contributors to the E3SM wildfire module that integrates process representation of ignition, spread, extinction, duration of wildfire as well as the state-of-the-art machine learning and artificial intelligence models. He also works on assessing and mitigating the environmental impacts of wildfire emitted greenhouse gases and aerosols.

Fires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are increasingly damaging to communities across the United States.  Beyond physical damage to homes and infrastructure and threats to life-safety, WUI fires induce large, indirect effects that cascade across regional economies.  We develop an approach to measure losses to employment, the number of households, household income, and industrial output from economic shocks induced from wildfires and compare the magnitude of effects across different communities.  Using computable general equilibrium models, we simulate wildfire shocks to business interruption, housing loss, and population outmigration.  

 David T. Butry

Dr. David T. Butry is the Chief of the Applied Economics Office (AEO) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  He leads research focused on (1) measuring the benefit-cost performance of life-safety technologies, building codes, and standards; (2) estimating the economic impacts resulting from wildland fires; and (3) measuring the return-on-investment of hazard mitigation activities.

Since the mid-1980s, when accurate satellite records of burned areas begin, the annual area burned by wildfire in the western US has increased nearly fourfold. This increase has been most heavily concentrated in forests, which experienced an increase of approximately 1300%. In this talk I will diagnose this rapid increase in western US wildfire activity, shedding data- and logic-informed light on a topic that has been unnecessarily politicized. I will then explore how wildfires have affected western US streamflow to date and whether continued rapid increases in wildfire activity are likely to meaningfully affect western US water resources across large spatial scales in the coming decades.

Park Williams

Park Williams is an associate professor in UCLA’s Geography Department whose research aims to understand the causes and consequences of hydrological extremes such as drought. Much of his research focuses on climate science in its own right, and much also aims to improve understanding of how hydrological extremes affect life on earth. Questions that he finds especially interesting involve the effects of human-caused climate change on the hydrological cycle, ecological systems, and humanity through extreme events such as heat waves, wildfires, and flooding.

While the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is not a new concept, fires in WUI communities have rapidly expanded in frequency and severity. The number of fatalities and structures lost per year has drastically increased, due in part to increased development in rural areas, fuel management policies, and climate change, all of which are projected to increase in the future. Modeling the transition between fire spread in wildland fuels into WUI communities is of great interest to the fire research community; however, there are many challenges before this goal can be achieved. In this talk, a review of the mechanisms governing both wildland and WUI fire spread will be presented, including new research in both areas. Available knowledge and techniques that currently exist will be reviewed and opportunities for future modeling presented. Finally, the opportunities WUI fire modeling unlocks, such as refined risk assessment, community design, and emergency response will also be covered.

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Michael Gollner

Dr. Michael Gollner is an Associate Professor and Deb Faculty Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously an Associate Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD from 2012-2019. Dr. Gollner studies how fires ignite and spread within the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the physics and dynamics of wildland fire spread, the processes by which structures ignite from embers, and emissions and associated health effects from wildfire smoke. Highlights from this work include discovering new physical mechanisms of wildfire spread, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and authoring the two leading reviews on how fires spread into and within communities in Fire Technology and Progress in Energy and Combustion Science. This research has been funded by the US Forest Service, the National Science Foundation, the National Fire Protection Association, the National Institute for Standards and Technology and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Dr. Gollner has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications in leading international journals and over a hundred other presentations, articles, and reports related to these topics.

Dr. Gollner is a former Treasurer and current member of the Board of Directors for the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF), past Chair of the Research Advisory Board of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Fire Protection Research Foundation, and an elected member of the Management Committee of the International Association for Fire Safety Science. He is also a member of a Technical Review Committee (TRC) for CAL FIRE to review and provide comments to the State of California on its impending revised model for Fire Hazard Severity Zones (FHSZ). He serves as Associate Editor for the journal Fire Technology and is on boards for Fire Safety Journal and the International Journal of Wildland Fire. He has been awarded the NSF CAREER award, Tsuji Early Career Award by the Combustion Institute, Proulx Early Career Award in Fire Safety Science, and the Fire Protection Research Foundation Medal.

Turning Down the Heat: Redefining the Wildfire Problem and Solutions

 Decision-makers are desperately seeking solutions to the wildfire crisis that’s driven by several concurrently rising trends including home development, climate change, and accumulated fuels. Increasing risks and inevitable wildfires demand that we fundamentally rethink how, where, and under what conditions we build homes in wildfire-prone areas. This presentation will redefine the wildfire problem as a home-ignition problem, then share tools and resources to better identify, explore, and communicate wildfire data to help communities adapt to increasing risks.

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Kimiko Barrett, Ph.D.

Kimiko Barrett is the lead wildfire research and policy analyst at Headwaters Economics, a non-partisan independent research organization based in Bozeman, Montana. She is also the Program Director for Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire (CPAW), working with communities across the country to better plan, mitigate, and adapt to wildfires. Kimi regularly engages with firefighters, land use and planning staff, government agency personnel, and elected officials to help reduce wildfire risk and increase community resiliency.

 Kimi is a committed agent of change in how we live with inevitable wildfires. Drawing on the expertise within the broad networks she has built, she has led research of national significance on topical issues such as the true cost of wildfires, the cost of building wildfire-resistant homes, and measuring wildfire impacts through structure loss. Her work has changed the national wildfire narrative and shaped new strategies for protecting communities from wildfire. Born and raised in Bozeman, Montana, Kimi now lives in nearby Livingston. As a researcher, she enjoys engaging with people on complex issues such as community resilience, adaptation, and vulnerability. Kimi has a Ph.D. in Forestry from University of Montana.

Recent wildfires in the western United States (US) have led to substantial economic losses and social stresses. There is a great concern that the new climatic state may further increase the intensity, duration, and frequency of wildfires. To examine historical wildfire trends, we analyzed a total of 183,970 observed wildfire events over the conterminous United States (CONUS) for the last 33 years (1984-2016). While the annual number of all wildfire events has decreased (-16%), the number of large wildfires has increased significantly (+64%). Five commonly used fire danger indices (FDIs) that incorporate weather and fuel conditions are calculated at 4 km using a high-quality observational dataset. Results show that higher values of FDIs correlate to larger total fire size; this relationship is more robust for predicting wildfire size on larger scales. To assess the climate change impacts on future fire activities, we further calculate mid- and end-of- century FDIs using regional climate model simulations at 12 km. Multiple climate model simulations project increasing wildfire potential and longer fire seasons over broader areas based on the estimated FDIs. In addition to relative humidity, temperature and precipitation, wind speed is important in the instance of high fire danger.

Yan Feng

Dr. Feng is a Principal Atmospheric and Climate Scientist at Argonne, and a Scientist at Large with Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering, University of Chicago. She also has a Graduate Faculty Scholar appointment at the Northern Illinois University. 

Dr. Feng’s research focuses on global and regional modeling of aerosols, clouds, and interactions with climate change, air pollution, and biogeochemical cycle. She has 40+ peer-reviewed journal publications including Nature Geoscience, PNAS, and Geophysical Research Letters, and co-authored three book chapters. Her work has 4200+ citations in Google Scholar. Dr. Feng has a H-index of 22, and currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. She joined Argonne as an Assistant Atmospheric Scientist in 2010, after she did the postdoctoral study at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego.

In response to increased wildfire activity across the western US, policymakers and managers are confronted with a variety of options for reducing damages. These policy and management options can have differing consequences in terms of who pays for wildfire damage. In this talk, I will discuss a series of research projects aimed at improving understanding of how exposure to wildfire risk is distributed across households in the western US, and how benefits from various wildfire management strategies are distributed across households.

Matthew Wibbenmeyer

Matthew Wibbenmeyer’s research seeks to understand climate impacts and climate mitigation policies related to the forest and land sectors, with a special focus on wildfire. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an M.S. in resource conservation from The University of Montana. As an undergraduate, he studied economics and biology at Williams College.

Since 1986, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA®) has been working to help save lives and property from wildfires through community engagement, the development of standards related to safer construction and design, training of professionals, outreach, and advocacy. Michele Steinberg, NFPA’s Wildfire Division Director and a board member of the International Association of Wildland Fire, will provide an overview of NFPA’s work in wildfire resilience, with a focus on its flagship community engagement program, Firewise USA®, and its policy initiative, Outthink Wildfire™.

Michele Steinberg

Michele Steinberg is the Wildfire Division Director at the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA®), leading a team dedicated to wildfire safety outreach. NFPA’s wildfire-related projects cover a broad spectrum of safety education, advocacy, professional training and international outreach, including the Firewise USA® recognition program and the Wildfire Community Preparedness Day campaign. She serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Wildland Fire and on the Executive Advisory Committee of the Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Membership Division of the American Planning Association. Michele holds a Master of Urban Affairs degree from Boston University.

Wildfires are a complex physical process that occur both naturally and at the hands of humans. Fires are necessary to support many ecosystems and cultures, but are producing increasingly disastrous human outcomes globally, and particularly in the western US. While engineering and technological advances have substantially mitigated other types of natural disasters over decades, there is a considerable lag in this arena for wildfire, which is a product of how fire has been historically viewed in the US. Here, I review both why the frameworks applied to disaster mitigation have been overlooked with respect to wildfire and also the state-of-the-science regarding common misconceptions about wildfire mitigation. Further, I highlight key areas where engineering, technology, and data sciences could produce substantial and rapid advances in mitigating wildfire disasters. I also offer suggestions for development of near-term research in wildfire mitigation and adaption, particularly through replication, amplification, and expansion of natural biological solutions.

Crystal Kolden

Assistant Professor in the Management of Complex Systems Department, School of Engineering, at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on characterizing and understanding wildfire intersections with the human-environment system through geospatial, temporal, and mixed-methods approaches.