Arizona's Yarnell Hill fire claimed the lives of 19 firefighters. Colorado's Waldo Canyon, Black Forest, and High Park fires were some of the costliest ever in terms of homes and property lost.
A better wildfire weather prediction system might have saved more lives and property. The state of Colorado thinks so, and has agreed to beta test a new system pioneered by the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, starting late in the 2016 fire season.
William Mahoney, deputy director of the research applications lab at NCAR, said the technology has the potential to make firefighters safer, because it combines two models: one that predicts weather and another that predicts fire.
Scientists know that in large fires, the heat and moisture from the fire "actually changes the local weather," said Mahoney, but right now "everyone is kind of blind to that reaction." This is a problem, because the interaction between the fire and the weather often leads to some pretty extreme events, he said.
During California's and the Pacific Northwest 2015 fire season, "the firefighters were saying this fire is huge and it is creating its own weather and they have absolutely no tools on how the fire will behave," Mahoney said.
In the 2015 legislative session, Colorado lawmakers, frustrated by what they viewed as slow federal responses to devastating wildfires in 2012 and 2013, voted to
fund the NCAR model
for a real-world trial over the next five years. State legislators also approved new aerial firefighting capabilities in 2013 as part of this effort.
Gov. John Hickenlooper signed House Bill 1129 on Wednesday afternoon at a fire station in Arvada, implementing one of several bills lawmakers drafted in response to wildfires in El Paso County and elsewhere.
"This bill will predict the intensity and the direction of fires 12 to 18 hours ahead of time. That is really important so we know where to direct our planes, the aircraft we had a bill for last year, and our firefighters," said Rep. Tracy Kraft-Tharp, D-Arvada, who introduced the bill. "This is really revolutionary."
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Colorado plans to test a new wildfire prediction system next year that could protect firefighters from blazes that have been burning out of control and causing more devastation in recent years.
The state will launch a trial run of technology from the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research starting late in the 2016 fire season, KUNC reported (
bit.ly/1O5dPaq
).
Researchers want to test the system for flood prediction, too. But lawmakers removed that portion of the bill to lower the price tag.
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