A hot spot in fire research has broken out in the development of simulators designed to anticipate the previously unpredictable behavior of wildfires.

In a new effort called the Data Dynamic Simulation for Disaster Management Project, a group of researchers from the University of Colorado at Denver; the University of Kentucky; Texas A&M University; Rochester Institute of Technology; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., have joined forces to develop state-of-the-art information tools and apply them to wildland fire management.

The team hopes that in the not-so-distant future, analysts using supercomputers may be able to send real-time maps and predictions of a wildfire's next moves to fire management teams down the road or across the state.

This critical information could be delivered on handheld and other wireless devices to firefighters in the smoke deciding how best to battle the blaze.

“The purpose of the project is to provide a continuously updated prediction of how the fire will move in the next few hours or days and to predict the likely effect of firefighting strategies,” said Jan Mandel, a CU Denver professor of mathematics.

The researchers don't expect their simulator to solve all the problems related to wildfires, but it does significantly improve existing models, according to NCAR scientist Janice Coen.

Most simulation models are basically number crunchers that are unable to adjust to conditions that may be changing while the data is being processed.

This team is trying to develop ways to have the model keep ingesting new, updated information on such parameters as fire boundaries and weather updates while it is running, Coen said.

The four-year, $2 million project, funded by the National Science Foundation, will use the most recent advances in computing power, high-speed networks, satellite and sensor monitoring, mathematical theory, and meteorology to develop tools to warn firefighters about where a fire may go and sudden changes that might occur, such as wind shift or extreme fire behavior. It requires the power of a supercomputer to manage the flood of numbers.

According to Coen, this model is far more complicated than current operational tools such as BEHAVE and FARSITE that run on ordinary calculators or PCs.

“Ours allows you to simulate sudden changes in fire behavior due to changing weather such as windshifts due to thunderstorm down drafts, frontal passage and downslope winds; and some forms of erratic, extreme fire behavior such as fire whirls, crowning, and blow-ups that result from feedbacks between the fire and atmosphere,” she said.

Coen said many simulators create neat-looking gadgets that no one ever uses, because the people who were meant to use them weren't involved in the design. The researchers would like this system to be more relevant.

NCAR has a history of coupling numerical regional weather simulations with fire-spread models to advance the understanding of wildfires, although the challenges with this wildfire simulator are severe.

“There are many things about wildfires that aren't understood scientifically, and there are also a lot of technological challenges to simulating phenomena that change very rapidly,” Coen said.