CAREER: Towards a Better Understanding of Wildfire-Atmosphere Interactions-Integrating Fire Weather Research and Education

San Jose State University Foundation, San Jose CA

Investigators

Abstract

The research represents an effort to advance the understanding of wildfire-atmosphere dynamics by obtaining new observations from a comprehensive field program and integrating these observations into education and community outreach. The key objectives of the project are: 1) to develop a better understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for wildfire-atmosphere interactions and how these processes influence fire behavior; 2) to improve student understanding of fire weather science through the development of an innovative fire science and fire safety outreach and education program. The research seeks to identify the processes responsible for fire-atmosphere interactions that affect fire behavior. The research methods are based on executing an intensive measurement program that incorporates carefully planned experiments with rapid-deploy wildfire monitoring (RaDFIRE) using the newly NSF funded CSU-MAPS, mobile atmospheric profiling system. Observations will be integrated with numerical simulations made with the coupled WRF-Fire model to investigate: 1) the dynamics of fire-induced winds and their impact on fire behavior; 2) the thermodynamic structure of fire plumes and the near-surface environment. The education component of the project plans to build a university program in fire weather research that links San José State University and the community. This component will integrate fire weather content into general education courses, improve 6th grade science learning through a teacher training workshop, and develop fire danger awareness among students living in fire danger zones by providing a novel and modern fire safety education program. The component concepts are: 1) integration of Fire Weather content into university courses; 2) K-12 Teacher Training workshop called Weather of Wildfires; 3) Red-Flag Days: A community outreach program for middle schools in the Wildland-Urban Interface aimed at providing fire safety education. Intellectual merit. The work will potentially transform wildfire research by measuring critical wildfire-atmosphere properties that have rarely been observed. This will provide the first comprehensive data set for the validation of coupled atmosphere-fire modeling systems. New observations of extreme fire-induced winds and plume thermodynamic structure will lead to major advances in knowledge and understanding of wildfire dynamics. Broader impacts. The broader impacts of this work include: 1. Educational activities are developed to improve student understanding of fire weather processes by developing new teacher training modules and a novel middle-school program aimed at fire danger awareness with the use of red flags as fire weather props. 2. Greater understanding of critical fire-atmosphere processes responsible for extreme fire behavior. 3. Increased firefighter and public safety from the development of better prediction tools. 4. Web-based data portal developed to provide modeling community long-term access to datasets.