This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Wildfires cause great destruction including the loss of life and damage to property, infrastructure and the environment. The complexity of wildfire management arises from the uncertain dynamic interactions and dependencies among multiple system components. These include highly dynamic and nonlinear wildfire behaviors, weather conditions, and firefighting resource management. In previous research, these components have been largely treated in isolation in their own fields.
To achieve effective wildfire management, decision-making support tools that integrate all these components as a whole are needed. The objective of this project is to develop new models and computation methods that integrate weather prediction, wildfire simulation, data assimilation and stochastic optimization for effective wildfire response management. In doing so, the project will make two key paradigm-shifting advances in wildfire modeling and management: 1) coupled weather and wildfire modeling and data assimilation for two-way interactive dynamic weather-wildfire prediction, and 2) Integrated wildfire simulation and stochastic optimization for wildfire containment. The project focuses on computational thinking for understanding the complexity in the natural systems of weather and wildfire behavior, and in the man-made system of firefighting resources management. Due to the stochastic and multiscale nature of the problem data associated with these systems, the project also involves data assimilation and parallel/distributed computational methods for robust weather and wildfire behavior predictions.
The results of this project will aid in wildfire management to alleviate losses caused by wildfires through robust firefighting resource management decisions. The collaboration with the Texas Forest Service will enable validation and transfer of the resulting knowledge, systems and tools to real wildfire management. The results of the research will also benefit other emergency response applications such as those in homeland security. The project will provide interdisciplinary training to both undergraduate and graduate students and will develop a web-based education and training simulation environment. The project will also strengthen and complement existing K-12 outreach programs at Georgia State University (GSU), University of Oklahoma (OU), and Texas A&M University (TAMU) for minority students, and will make a concerted effort to broaden the participation of underrepresented students in research and education. Results of the research will be presented at conferences and published in refereed journals.
