Firefighters have long studied how fires behave to figure out where they鈥檙e going and how to keep people safe. But wildfires are becoming more unpredictable.
Decades of poor forest management along with development in fire-prone areas and the climate crisis are making wildfires more destructive. Some of these hot, massive blazes even create their own microclimate that鈥檚 not as affected by external weather (called a plume-driven or plume-dominated fires).
One fire scientist based in Montana, Mark Finney, compared these firestorms to the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, as he explained in .
鈥淪o a certain amount of information was developed during those days (about these kinds of firestorms), but then the interest died off. We didn鈥檛 really have too many of these fires in the United States for many, many decades. And so now it seems like people are more and more aware that these kinds of fires can happen,鈥� he told the Mountain West 暗黑爆料 Bureau.
A consortium of fire researchers called is hopeful it can predict where these fires might crop up.
"If you look at how models are developed, they鈥檙e built off of historic trends. And you look at our future conditions, they don鈥檛 match up with our historic trends," said David Saah, a professor at the University of San Francisco and one of the Pyregence researchers.
However, Saah says the group is working fast.
"We don鈥檛 have time to wait five years," he said. "So beta versions for the near-real-term stuff is already up and running. It was already used in this fire season. It鈥檚 already saved some lives and communities."
Much of the group鈥檚 forecasting focused on California this year, but Saah expects it to spread throughout the continental U.S. in the years to come.
However, Finney in Montana says that while modeling is good, there鈥檚 only so much it can achieve.
鈥淭he big problem occurs because with some kinds of fire behaviors that have, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, beyond the reach of any kind of predictive modeling,鈥� he said.
For example, he said those large, plume-dominated fires 鈥渋nvolve atmospheric coupling and dynamics where very tall pyroconvective storms, such as basically thunderstorms, occur because of the heating at the surface from the fire. Those are meteorological phenomena as much as a fire phenomena. And they're very, very difficult to predict faster than real time.鈥�
So Finney said the most important part of modeling isn鈥檛 predicting what a large fire is going to do, but how to mitigate the potential for a large fire, how to anticipate them and how to be safe around them.
鈥淢odeling, in a predictive sense once the fire's been going, offers us very, very little bang for the buck. There's just not much that we can do at that point,鈥� he said.
So the way forward, he said, is still largely through land management and promoting healthy fire use around the West. When a massive area hasn鈥檛 seen fire for decades, Finney said there鈥檚 little to stop a fire there from getting bigger and bigger.
鈥淪uppression is largely ineffective on large fires when the weather is very dry and there鈥檚 very dry wind events,鈥� he said. 鈥淪o the only proactive way to deal with this is through managing these lands, understanding the role that land plays in the vegetation dynamics, and being tolerant of having fire as a partner in managing lands.鈥�
鈥淔ire鈥檚 really as much of an ally as it is an enemy in these cases and we鈥檝e failed to really form an alliance with it and use it as a tool as people for thousands of years before us had done.鈥�
This story was produced by the Mountain West 暗黑爆料 Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Montana, KUNC in Colorado, KUNM in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West 暗黑爆料 Bureau is provided in part by the .
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