It takes a lot of experience and knowledge about the land to plan a successful prescribed burn, but fire models can help burn planners leverage data and science to plan more effectively. As a first step, we need to model vegetation and winds in 3D. And then we can use physics to create simulations of fire behavior under different conditions. For example, fire conditions are high when winds are very strong and vegetation is very dry, or when wind speeds are lower and there is more moisture in vegetation. However, these approaches to scientific fire modeling can require more storage and computing power than a typical laptop can provide.
Because our fire models are very high resolution and 3D, they require a lot of computing power to run. So we run the models in parallel so that we can have the results more quickly. Our software tools are web-based, so the users can set up models through the web interface and then run them on our supercomputers. We also store the model results there too. Using the supercomputers provides burn planners with many different simulations under different conditions, so they can consider new approaches to prescribed burns and optimize their activities.
When we show practitioners our software platform where they can run fire models, they often come up with new and more challenging problems that they want us to solve. They want to be able to model fires faster, across larger landscapes, and also model other things related to fire like smoke.
