Camp Fire Tragedy Leads to New Wildfire Research
- Kia Rastar
- Jun 26, 2020
- 1 min read
Moved by the tragedy of the 2018 Camp Fire, a team of engineers and scientists are coming together in a new five-year project to develop a comprehensive, holistic, computational live, digital platform to predict and monitor wildfire risk that can be used by wildfire managers, emergency responders and utility companies to plan for, respond to and remediate wildfires.
With a background and expertise in computational modeling in civil engineering, Hamed Ebrahimian, from the College of Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, began pursuing a better way to understand fire risk. He assembled a multi-institutional group of researchers with a similar desire to use science and technology to reduce the chances that the world would suffer from another wildfire of the Camp Fire magnitude.
With a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s LEAP-HI program, the research project envisions an eventual live, digital platform that evolves with new data and dynamically updates the long-term (seasons/months ahead) to short-term (weeks/days ahead) pre-ignition fire risks at regional and community scales for risk management, and the post-ignition fire behavior at near-real-time (hours-days) for situational awareness.
