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Integrated Wildland Fire Mapping, Monitoring, and Modeling
Problem Statement
Wildfires impact property, natural resources, watersheds, and air quality. They can occur over vast areas and continue for months. They can occur in regional outbreaks, with any of several poised to grow rapidly, competing for suppression resources.
Technological Advances
Recent advances in satellite-based fire detection and mapping, airborne fire mapping and measurement, and coupled weather-wildland fire modeling present a new opportunity to routinely map fire extent and progression, examine active fire areas in detail, and predict fire growth, intensification, and extreme behaviors.
The new Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor on the Suomi NPP satellite began returning active fire detection data in Jan. 2012, twice per day. It improves and extends MODIS fire detection (1 km pixel size) (Fig. 1a) with earlier detection of small fires and 375 m pixel data (Fig. 1b).
Airborne Fire Mapping and Measurement
Fig. 1. Satellite fire detection imagery of the same fire at approximately the same times from (a) MODIS, launched on Aqua in 2002, and (b) the newer VIIRS instrument.
Satellite-based Fire Detection and Mapping
The FireMapper airborne radiometer on the USDA Forest Service research aircraft detects the heat signature of a fire. High resolution (~7 m) unsaturated pixels show a fire’s extent and areas of active and more intense burning through smoke, revealing fire behavior (Fig. 2). The data can be used to validate coarser resolution satellite measurements.
Fig. 2. Color-coded ground surface temperatures during the 2006 Esperanza wildfire mapped using the FireMapper.
For More Information Contact:
Dr. Janice Coen, National Center for Atmospheric Research
P.O. Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307-3000, (303) 497-8986 [email protected]
Dr. Philip Riggan, USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station 4955 Canyon Crest Drive, Riverside, CA 92507 (951) 680-1500 [email protected]
Dr. Wilfrid Schroeder, Dept. of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 (301) 683-3582 [email protected]
Decision Support
Combined application of these three technologies improves and extends current fire mapping, monitoring, and prediction tools. VIIRS fire products can routinely monitor the extent of larger fires; CAWFE uses this data, providing a detailed understanding and prediction of how fires evolve; and FireMapper gives detailed mapping of fire behavior and surface temperatures associated with fire intensity on selected fires, while validating both VIIRS and CAWFE. Decision support applications include managing wildland fires, estimating emissions of carbon, trace gases, and particulates, and anticipating air quality, watershed, and land surface impacts.
Coupled Weather-Wildland Fire Modeling NCAR’s Coupled Atmosphere-Wildland Fire Environment (CAWFE) model and the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with WRF-Fire each couple a numerical weather prediction model with wildland fire behavior algorithms to simulate fire behavior. These not only predict a fire’s shape and extent, but extreme behaviors such as fire whirls, blow-ups, flank runs, and pyrocumulus, all resulting from a fire’s interaction with its environment, i.e. how the fire ‘creates its own weather’. The coupled models have been evaluated on numerous cases (ex.: Fig. 3), capturing overall unfolding of events, locations where fires intensified and accelerated, splitting of the head, and flank runs. VIIRS data is used to initialize and validate fire extent. (Fig. 4).
Fig. 3. CAWFE simulation of the 2006 Esperanza wildfire. The rate of heat release is shown, according to the color bar (left). Intensely burning regions are yellow and orange. The misty field shows the smoke plume, which is deeper over intensely burning regions of the fire.
Fig. 4. CAWFE simulation of the 2012 Little Bear Fire. The yellow shape is the VIIRS fire perimeter used for initialization. The red shape is the VIIRS fire perimeter at the time of the simulation 12 h later.
