Gaining ground against wildfires Technology from the U.S. Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula helps firefighters work efficiently

Barely a firefighter could be spared when another thunderstorm floated above Glacier National Park last summer, raking its forests with lightning.

Thousands of acres were already burning. The lightning created yet another monster.

James Hagengruber
Staff writer

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=030704&ID=s1496846

Instead of plowing miles of fire line to corral the blaze, fire managers relied on a new piece of software that predicted the exact path and arrival time of the flames. Firefighting resources were marshaled at a critical point downwind from the
advancing fire. If the computer was correct, the firefighters would have no trouble taming the blaze.

"They held the fire," said David Tippets, a Forest Service spokesman from Ogden, Utah. "They predicted right down to within a couple hundred yards. It’s amazing."

New technology is revolutionizing how wildfires are fought. Satellites with thermal-imaging cameras snoop deep into the backcountry looking for hidden fires. A massive new map is being drawn to catalog fuel types on every acre of the nation’s forests. Powerful software is taking some of the mystery and madness out of wildfire.

Many of the advances have been engineered in a brick building on the outskirts of Missoula. This is the home of the U.S. Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory, the world’s leading research center for wildland fires. Next door is another Forest Service facility, where much of the agency’s protective gear for firefighters is designed.

The heart of the fire lab is a combustion chamber the size of a large garage, but much taller and with a giant fume hood hanging from the ceiling. Researchers conduct controlled burns in the lab and in an adjoining wind tunnel.

With the flip of a switch, the chamber’s air can be transformed from wind-swept chaparral to equatorial cloud forest. Dozens of tiny sensors are employed to gather data as fires sweep through miniature forests made of bundles of wood fiber. The raw data becomes the foundation on which all predictive wildfire modeling software is based, said Kevin Ryan, a project leader at the lab.

"We’re able to understand these processes at a much more sophisticated level," he said.

National map

The information on fire behavior is being poured into a national project that is expected to someday give local firefighters instant access to the same powerful tools used to stop the fire outside Glacier National Park last summer. The project calls for a national database of historic weather patterns and regularly updated fuel conditions for every acre of forest. The fuel inventory is being created, acre by acre, using satellite images and field surveys.

About 27 million acres in Western Montana and 19million acres in Utah were the first to be mapped and entered into the new national database. The modeling software was widely used across Montana in last summer’s firefighting efforts.

Officials in Washington, D.C., like the system so much they want the entire country mapped and ready in five years. This will require a huge effort, Ryan said. When asked if the timetable was realistic, Ryan simply smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

Along with fire behavior data gathered in the Missoula lab’s combustion chamber, the software will tap into a vast database of the burn characteristics of 2,000 species of trees, grasses and shrubs. The program knows that flames advance slowly through a field of spotted knapweed in 30percent humidity, for example, or that a stand of grand fir burns differently from a grove of Western larch.

With a laptop computer and an Internet connection, any fire manager will be able to log on to the system and zoom in on detailed topographic maps of a region. The software will analyze the local weather, fuels and topography to generate a precisely mapped out prediction of where the fire will spread.

The software will be especially helpful in designing safer and more effective prescribed burns, Ryan said.

According to recent Interior Department estimates, about 190million acres of Western forests are at risk for catastrophic wildfire. They have been without fire for too long because of the federal government’s century-old policy of attacking every wildfire, no matter where it burns.

The Bush administration wants 4 million acres of thick forest burned and thinned next year. This ambitious plan makes it even more critical to have better modeling tools, Ryan said.

Spotters in space

Wei Min Hao, another project leader at the lab, believes the future of firefighting will be high in the sky. Hao, a scientist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, developed software that employs NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites to find wildland fires from 450 miles above Earth.

This type of information once came only from lookout towers or airplane flights. The satellites pass over North America four times daily, beaming back their data to a receiver resembling a large golf ball on the roof of the Missoula fire lab. The satellite’s thermal cameras can easily penetrate smoke and are only occasionally confused by manmade heat sources, such as the steel smelters near Chicago, Hao said.

"This is the first-ever system to monitor fire in almost real time," he said.

Previously, fire managers relied on information from aerial reconnaissance flights, but this information was often hours old or came from nighttime flights when the fire was inactive. The satellite images are more accurate, dependable and timely, Hao said.

The nation’s top fire managers analyze the satellite images every morning during fire season. Fresh images also are sent to members of Congress and to the White House each afternoon, Hao said. Last summer, the information proved especially helpful, he said. During the peak of the fire season, as many as 80 fires were burning in the United States.

"This has become very, very critical for (national fire managers) to decide how to allocate resources," Hao said.

Within a decade, Hao hopes geostationary satellites, which stay in the same place above Earth, will be posted over the West sending back a constant stream of images. Such a system would cost about $1billion, he said, but would make firefighting even more efficient.

Measuring moisture

One of the smaller advancements in wildland firefighting technology is a fuel moisture meter from the Forestry Sciences Laboratory at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Although the device is only the size of a Thermos, it has the ability to transform prescribed burns from a blunt instrument into a precision tool for restoring forest health.

Research engineer Peter Robichaud developed the moisture meter. About 40 are in the field, at a cost of $1,300 each.

The meter works by sending an electronic pulse through a sample of forest floor debris, known as duff. The response of the pulse provides a near-instant reading on exactly how much moisture is contained in the fallen leaves, pine needles, small twigs and other organic material that provide fuel for fires.

The duff plays a huge role in how fast and hot a fire burns. Its moisture level is a critical piece of information when planning a prescribed burn, Robichaud said.

Previously, a sample would need to be analyzed in a lab. The process usually took at least 48 hours. Duff moisture content, however, can swing dramatically in the course of a day.

"This is the first method that can actually be used in real time," Robichaud said. "Old-time fire bosses would just pick up the duff, squeeze it, toss it into the wind and make a guess. They had that gut feeling."

Information from the moisture meter adds a new level of accuracy to the computer prediction software and decreases firefighters’ anxiety. It’s one more example of how wildland fires are being tamed by science.

"The more information you have, the better decisions people are going to make," Robichaud said. "It’s that simple."

•James Hagengruber can be reached at (208) 765-7126 or by e-mail at [email protected].