A special crew of fire managers is overseeing the response to these fires from a base at the Galena Airport. The managers are being assisted by computers that help predict the future of a wildfire.
Sam Amato and Risa Lang-Navarro are sitting at a table in a windowless room, bank of laptops open in front of them. They are the analysts on Diane Hutton’s Northern Rockies Fire Management Team, which is in charge of fires near the villages of Ruby and Nulato. While other firefighters live in a world of Pulaskis, chainsaws and pumps – these two live in a world of data.
Temperature, wind speed, humidity, fuel type, fire behavior, satellite imagery, topography, and lots of other variables go into the computer models that Amato and Lang-Navarro run on their laptops – and what you get are predictions. It’s like a weather forecast, except with fire, showing where the fire is likely to move and how quickly it will get there.
Sam Amato is the long term analyst on the team. Even though the fire prediction models draw from reams of information in databases and coming in from automated weather observation stations, Amato says that the models still rely on human input to make them work well.
“They are very rough estimates. So we depend a lot on information coming back from the field to help me pick the correct weather station, help me calibrate the fuels, ,change the fuel models to be more representative . Typically it will take between 3 days and a week to get the models where they are really helpful to the field, unless you are in a unit where there is a lot of fire activity, then they tend to have those pre-calibrated because they are doing this so much on that particular unit.”
She too believes that it is important to get away from the desk and see the fire with her own eyes. “Not only looking at the fuels and topography out there, but also interacting with the crews and getting their feedback.”
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