Volume VIII, Number 3, Fall 1995

fS is the idea of David BraYI currently a senior at T.c. Williams High School in Alexandrial VA. David was hired as part ofan innovative program which began at lOA last year. This issue of Networking includes an article on Partnership-in-Educationl IDAls outreach to the children in our community.

fS: forest fire flame front forecaster is a user-friendly, three-dimensional computer simulation currently under development at IDA. fS predicts the direction of the fire. We are all well aware of the summer forest fires that flare up throughout the western United States, resulting in untold damage to public and private lands, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to fight, and risking the lives of firefighters and the general population. Being able to predict where the flame front will go is critical for quickly and efficiently bringing the fire under control. The current prediction tool used hy firefighters in the field employs a simple algorithm running on a hand-held calculator. This tool was first developed in the early 1970s when field access to computers was all but impossible. Although this calculator-based algorithm is fast, it is incapable of incorporating subtle yet important complexities such as fire-generated winds. The oversimplifications necessary to fit the computations onto a calculator greatly reduces the fidelity and hence utility of such a prediction tool. With the advent of increasingly powerful laptop computers, the computational power now exists to remove the restrictions on the model and to generate a more credible and efficient physics-based simulation. fS is such a simulation. Utilizing digital elevation maps to represent the topography, local meteorological data for large-scale wind and moisture conditions, and remote sensing data (e.g., LANDSAT imagery) to determine the vegetation cover and fuel content, fS provides a graphical representation of the likely path the fire will take. This information can then be used by the firefighters in real time to allocate the proper resources and assess the impact of various fire suppression techniques. Over the next several months, fS will be tested against an extensive historical database of fires in the western United States. This validation is critical to assess the robustness and utility of the model as well as to identify the dominant relevant input parameters (such as wind speed and fuel content). With knowledge of the dominant parameters, a suite of sensors could be employed on either an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or a small satellite, thus merging significant technical advances in both simulations and remote sensing technology in a way that is most useful to the firefighter.