John,
Did you hear the NPR thing? The guy was a helicopter pilot who got too injured in an accident to continue to fly so started to go along and photo fires from the air and there fore was able to bring back much more precise location information (with gis in the helicopoter, I guess) than previously. The contact with the Redlands group was a second thought.
Thanks for getting in touch.
n
Nicholas Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson----- Original Message -----
From: John Pfersich
To: nickthompson at earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 1/15/2006 10:03:31 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fire Mapping and Prediction
I took a course back in 1973 or 1974 that was called "Forest Fire Control and Use" taught by a Dr. Chuck Olson. Back then there were troubles modeling the spread of fires because the data regarding the spread rates of different combustibles were not accurately nor completely studied. Another problem was that computers were generally not used to do the modeling.
There's also a researcher in (I think) a Forest Service facility that had published a paper in the past couple of years regarding advances he had made in predicting fire spread, but the methods aren't much different than the ones used in the seventies, they're just more accurate because there's more data to work with the computers are used for modeling.
One thing that I find amusing is that the modeling cannot be far off, though in most cases it's better to overestimate fire spread than to undershoot it. I'd not hold too much hope for ESRI's software until it's proved successful in predicting fire spread over 20 or more fires, preferably larger ones.
At 10:40 AM 1/15/2006 -0500, you wrote:
Hi,
Those of you in the west might keep your ears peeled for an NPR report I just heard (11.30 eastern) on a guy in the LA fire department who, in conjunction with a company called ESRI in Redlands California has developed maps that predict fire movement and allow command centers to allocate resources more efficiently. Apparently was involved in keep ing a recent fire from jumping 101. It definitey piqued my curiosity...: if anybody else hears or heard it, could you comment?
thanks,
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson
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