Fire season has been growing longer every year with ever-more-destructive wildfires. It is one of many real-world impacts of a changing climate where global surface temperatures have soared since the 1980s. Even now we are seeing more devastating impact on hard-hit Napa Valley, home of an iconic California industry.
I don’t want to get into a climate change debate, argue over the loss of snow cover or Arctic ice, or debate the level of human causation. What I care about is the impact on humans and animals, personal loss and economic disruption – this year made far more complicated because of COVID-19.
According to C|NET, “Climate change and fires are now caught in a feedback loop. Rising global temperatures make fires more likely because they extend dry seasons and create drier plant life that’s more likely to burn in hotter weather. Fires in turn release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and remove carbon-neutralizing trees from the environment.”
It benefits all of us to be able to better fight wildfires, including our courageous first responders. Like so many things, the future is happening in San Diego. In a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) called WIFIRE, a team of researchers led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the UC San Diego campus developed novel software tools for aiding wildfire first responders and providing vital situational awareness to the public. The NSF grant ended in 2018 but its work continues in the SDSC WIFIRE Lab, which provides links to satellite-based images from NASA as well as officially announced fire perimeters. WIFIRE provides faster-than-real-time simulation of the most probable evolution of the wildfire perimeter – the issue everyone worries about. It incorporates current information from distributed weather stations and cameras, together with databases on the land’s vegetation, topography, and fuel load. Firefighters can use the WIFIRE data to battle fires and predict where fires might erupt next.
Today, WIFIRE Lab is a collaboration between the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Qualcomm Institute at UCSD and plays a growing role in fighting wildfires. WIFIRE Lab founder and SDSC chief data science officer Ilkay Altintas, PhD, said in an article published by Northeastern University this year, “You can’t control the fire, but you can manage it. You need real-time info on that fire as it changes and becomes more destructive. You have to understand current conditions and load all that data into a fire behavior model to see where it’s going to go.”
Dr. Altintas reports new efforts to use data, cyberinfrastructure, and artificial intelligence to advance fire science and a new NSF-funded project to create a WIFIRE Commons to share data and models in a multidisciplinary collaboration with scientists, municipal leaders and fire managers.
Obviously, the more data, the better the product that WIFIRE can deliver. Today, in addition to NSF, fire agencies in San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, and Ventura counties financially support WIFIRE. But they are a fraction of the firefighting agencies in the west – like those in Oregon – that could benefit from this data.
And, it should be pointed out, nearly half of California’s land is controlled by the Federal Government. The Federal Government needs to examine its own forest-management practices before it criticizes California for what it does and does not do. In 2020, the devastating California wildfires to date started or spread through the Plumas National Forest, the Sierra National Forest, the Mendocino National Forest, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and the Six Rivers National Forest.
I’ve done science and technology policy for most of my career. And for a good part of that career I’ve marketed my state and my region. I have a real interest in tackling the problems that mar California’s image as a place to live, work and play. Nothing has excited me quite as much as WIFIRE. I don’t have special access to it. It’s available to the public as well. In the last two months alone, WIFIRE was visited more than 6.7 million times by 340,000 visitors. Including me.
At the peak of the most recent fires, the view of the western United States looked like it had a bad case of black measles that sickened California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and more, with the big fires on the West Coast adding angry red inflammation where they were actively burning. Zoom in closer and you start to see the sheer magnitude of these fires. Closer, and you see cities where you may have friends you are suddenly prompted to check on, especially when headlines say that dozens of people are unaccounted for.
In 2017, because I have friends in Santa Barbara, in I was glued to the map to monitor the Thomas Fire, which extended from Ventura to Santa Barbara and literally circled the town of Ojai. I was struck that the challenge to firefighters was that, at a critical point, this huge fire was advancing on at least four fronts. In 2018, the Woolsey Fire started in eastern Ventura County, jumped the freeway and advanced through Malibu. I had dear friends living in Malibu Canyon and was able to tell them that the Firemap showed the fire entirely north of Malibu Canyon Road, about three miles north of them. They evacuated, heading through the canyons to 101 just south of where the freeway had been closed by the fire.
Like cigarette smoking, smokers don’t keep it to themselves. On the Firemap, the “second-hand smoke” you see on the smoke analysis (see upper right-hand corner of the map to select the features you want to track) shows that these fires have impacted air quality in Canada, Mexico, all the way to the East Coast and even to Europe!
Let the seriousness of this fire season motivate you to do all you can to prevent wildfires. It is not likely to get easier but there are things you can do. Move dense landscaping and decorative bark away from your house. Make sure that, where possible, your home and your community have 100 feet of defensible space on all sides (San Diego requires 50 feet) and get rid of dead plants and brushy undergrowth. Consider fire-resistant landscaping. Seal your soffit vents so embers can’t fly in and burn your house from the inside. In any renovation or repair, use fire-resistant materials such as tile or metal roofs, engineered materials in place of wood, steel framing, non-combustible insulation and double-paned windows. In fire season, plan ahead for what you will take if you need to evacuate and where you will meet loved ones. And insist that our policymakers pass legislation to ensure that all new construction is hardened to wildfires, especially in the wildland-urban interface and in the many canyon areas in San Diego.
Although I avoid the climate-change debates, we in California need to learn to live with wildfires. Smart preparedness, our committed first responders, and WIFIRE can help us do that.
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