 And so, again, please feel free to leave your cameras and your microphones off, but I hadn't put anything into the chat, but you'd like to. A 21st grader from NYWA, wow, Karl, that's amazing. And we have Saskatchewan Canada joining us today too. That's wonderful. So I'm just gonna go ahead and get started. Everybody, my name is Tim Barnes. I'm a science education specialist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And I'm here with my colleague today, who you know, Jason, who's a project scientist at NCARM. We're both coming to you from our homes, but we're still doing our work and we're gonna share it with you. So with no further ado, I'm going to turn this over to Jason and let him tell you about what he does and take your questions. So Jason, go ahead. Tim, thank you for that. It's great to see you again. You too. Thank you to everyone who joined with interest in learning about wildfire prediction. If I can find on my very complex set of virtual screens here exactly where I've got my, there's the talk, okay? I will start sharing this. All right, I can see my opening page and I hope all of you can too. I'm gonna start with maybe one of the takeaway messages of this entire talk and that's that the real experts are these people, the great team of people that I work with and I've worked with over the last several years on this very interesting project that I'm gonna summarize today. First, a few things about me in case some of you were interested about how to get into this sort of career or any kind of career in the sciences. First of all, I'm gonna answer the question that's probably on your mind. Yes, distant cousin. By that I mean, if you're wondering about Evil Knievel, some of you that are younger might not know this name. He had his heyday back in the 70s. Yeah, he and I are distant cousins. I never met him, but I had a lot of people who like talking about the times that they met him. I was born in Laramie, Wyoming, just a little bit north of here when my father was a professor at the University of Wyoming. But after a few years, he got a job with Penn State. So Pennsylvania, in the town where Penn State's located, State College, is where I grew up. In high school, I wanted to be an architect. No idea about atmospheric science. Furthest thing from my mind. I went through all of high school without taking a single class in weather or geology or anything like that. But plans changed. So those of you that are worried about how to answer when some says, well, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Don't worry about it. You've got plenty of time to think about it. I got my bachelor's degree from Penn State. I was a townie, and then I moved to Colorado and got my master's and a PhD from Colorado State just up north in Fort Collins. For a few years, I was a radio forecaster before deciding to go to graduate school. I've been in Colorado since 1993. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. Another one of my best decisions was to marry my wife, who's a professor at CU. I have a son who's 14. And here are some of the things I like to do when I'm not doing atmospheric science, specifically photography and fly fishing among a lot of other things. And I think this is rarer than I first thought. I've been to all 50 states and five out of seven continents. It's nice when you can get your job to allow you to travel. So let's get back to the point at hand. Why is it so difficult to predict wildfires? Well, it's difficult because first, you've got to get the weather prediction right. Then you have to get a lot of other things right as well. So in that sense, you could argue it's more complicated than actually predicting weather. Go back to this. So if you look up the first thing about wildfire behavior, you'll come across some version of this triangle. It's a really important thing to remember. These are the three main ingredients that explain why wildfires behave the way they do. And it's the three things you've got to account for in your computer model, if you want to predict wildfires. Like I said, first is the weather. And then next is the topography. By topography, I mean landforms. How the earth surface looks. Do you have a broad flat plane? Do you have a narrow valley, mountain peaks? How steep is the slope? That sort of thing. And then fuels. By fuel, you might think I'm talking about gasoline, diesel, well, those burn, but so does what we consider to be wildfire fuels, trees, brush, grass, could be living, could be dead. Also could be buildings, unfortunately. Pretty much anything on earth surface that can burn is considered to be a fuel of some kind. And so we have to account for those things in our wildfire behavior model. I have a quiz for you. Maybe Tim didn't warn you that I'd be popping a few quiz questions. I also warn you I'm a pretty tough grader. So take your best shot at this. If you want to answer in the chat, that's fine. If you want to keep your guests to yourself because you're a little less certain, that's fine, that's probably what I would do. So roughly on an annual basis in the United States, how many wildfires do you think there are? 50, 500, 5,000, 50,000, or sorry, yes, 50,000 or more than 50,000 in the US every year. So far we've got two for 500 and two for 5,000. A third person's coming in at 5,000. 5,000 seems like a lot. I mean, certainly we don't hear about that many on the news. Well, the answer actually is E, more than 50,000. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, on average over the course of from 1990 to 2020, average each year, there are more than 58,000 fires in the United States burning a total of 5.8 million acres. That's about the size of Vermont or New Hampshire, roughly. A lot more fires than I ever could have imagined until I got involved in this project. Most of them are small, fortunately, which is why we don't hear about them on the news. But taken as a whole, wildfires are a big challenge. They're deadly and they're expensive. For example, in 2018, the campfire, so this is the fire that burned the town of Paradise. You probably remember hearing about that. That was in 2018, the most expensive natural disaster, not in California, not in the US, in the entire world. It even beat out hurricanes, which usually you're kind of right up there on the tops of these rankings, more than $16 billion. Annually across the United States, costs and losses from wildfires in what's called the wildland urban interface, the wooey. Sounds a little bit like a Dr. Seuss word, the wooey. In the tens to hundreds of billions, what do I mean by wooey, wildland urban interface? I mean something like this. This is an aerial photograph of Silverthorne, Colorado, just by 70, after the Buffalo fire, showing in this wildland urban interface, you get a mixture of buildings and roads and natural terrain, grass, trees. In fact, you can even see signs of the fire that went through there right in the middle of that frame. So we're not talking about the inner city, which is pretty much just buildings. We're not talking about national forests out away from everybody, which is pretty much just wildland. We're talking about where the two meet. And in fact, that area, the wildland urban interface, it covers a lot of the United States, roughly a third of the US population somehow lives in or works in or is associated with the wildland urban interface. A bit of a problem, wildfires in general are getting worse in the United States. In fact, in 2020, we had Colorado's three largest wildfires and there was some scientific research that suggests that by 2050, the amount of burned area in the United States and Canada might double. I'm not saying necessarily that the number of fires increases that way because fires come in a variety of sizes. And in fact, recently, there hasn't really been an increase in the number of fires, but the fires that happened have been worse. Hotter, they burn more. Fires are also very complex. So if we hope to manage them, to understand them, we've got to rely on technology. And that is what motivated the state of Colorado in 2015 to sign into law a bill that, among other things, triggered a five-year project that I worked on that was led at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And this photograph here shows the signing ceremony. You might notice Governor Hickenlooper, now U.S. Senator Hickenlooper. And my boss, Bill Mahoney, he's the leader of our lab and also Janice Cohen, one of my colleagues in NCAR who over the last couple of decades has done some of the most important cutting edge research on truly sophisticated wildfire simulations. So we owe Janice a lot for the great work that she's done. And a lot of what we did in this project is based on her research. The project was managed by the Division of Fire Prevention and Control, and you see one of their planes in operation here on the right. Some of you, maybe most, all of you have probably sat around a campfire before. And you may have heard like I have that wildfires can be big enough that they can make their own weather, right? Well, in some sense, depending on how you define weather, all fires make their own weather. A campfire can make its own weather. And just imagine you're sitting around a campfire and you see the smoke rising up from the campfire. So there's smoke, that's making its own weather, particles introducing to the atmosphere. You can feel the heat radiating. And if you're also like me, you have trouble finding a place to put your camp chair down where you don't get a face full of smoke like every three minutes. You have to rotate around. And some of that is because you get local turbulence that the fire creates. And it's true that the changes to the atmosphere around a campfire are really, really local. They're very small, but the fire is small. But in a sense, those are still weather changes. We'll imagine scaling that up until you've got a behemoth of a fire like this, the car fire in California, that made this incredible vortex that in a lot of ways resembled what we think of as a traditional tornado that some of us have chased in the high plains before. On a tornado rating, this vortex that's pictured in the upper figure was an EF3. So this is very powerful. Some of the damage you see on the bottom, there's a pipe wrapped around a tree. You look at that, and if it weren't for all the burn scars, you would say tornado, you wouldn't say wildfire. So this issue of how the atmosphere and wildfires interact, very complex, potentially very violent, and some weather models and wildfire behavior models, not all of them simulate that two-way interaction. Let me go into a bit more detail about that. So how does the weather affect a fire? Well, the weather affects the amount of moisture in what we call fuels. So that's how wet or dry the stuff is on the ground that burns. The weather leading up to that could be the few weeks. It actually could be seasons of weather that leads up to how wet that fuel is. Wind plays a role in driving fires, lightning, if they're lightning caused fires, plays a role in where fires start. So pretty much how a fire moves across the landscape, where it starts, these are all things that weather has an effect on. So that's the weather to fire kind of communication. What about the other way? What about the fire to communication, to weather communication? Well, fires produce heat, they produce humidity in the form of water vapor that goes into the air, updrafts, turbulence, sometimes paracumulus clouds, like the one here that my colleague Amy photographed. Speed and direction of the wind right around a fire is changed. So they're always communicating all the time. So you have to be simulating both and that communication all the time. I've got an example of a simulation here. This is in particular is of the cold spring's fire, which happened a little bit into the foothills from where Tim and I work. For those of you that know Colorado well, this is the town of Netherland that I'm circling with my little mouse here. This is Barker Reservoir. So Boulder is off this image to the right. And I set this movie in motion. You will see the simulated fire start. Boom, there it is. The orange and the yellow, that is the simulated smoke. If you sort of take a step back and don't worry about the scale, it kind of looks like a campfire. You see it wasting all the way around. The smoke moves. Well, that's how the wind is influencing it. Wind on this figure is shown in the little arrows that continually dance around throughout the figure. Those arrows show the wind near the ground and they're color coded. When they're coded red, that means the atmosphere is getting warmed from the ground and everything on it. And when they're color coded blue, the opposite's happening. The atmosphere is cooling everything on the ground. Right now you see most of the vectors are blue. It's cool. It's nighttime in the simulation. And notice also the smoke is kind of contained near the ground. This is very typical. Daytime, wildfires blow up. The smoke is very vigorous. The fire is very vigorous. In nighttime, a lot of fires kind of lay down and the smoke is trapped in that stable air near the ground. Another simulation here of a fire in Arizona, the Arnael Hill fire. This is provided by Janice Cohen who ran a simulation. You see that ring of flame in the middle. This is quite a legendary fire among firefighters for all the wrong reasons. This fire killed 19 firefighters. And unfortunately, part of the reason that happened is very weather related. So you'll see here, look at the red arrows. The red would call them vectors. Kind of light wind. But then as the day goes on, you see the wind picks up from the west, from the left side of the figure to the right. And as a result, the fire is blown from the west to the east. And those brighter oranges show that. The fire is now advancing toward the east. But in a few seconds, you'll see this gust of wind come in from the top of the figure. You'll see it first show up in the vectors and then watch what happens to the fire itself. So let's wait right here. Here comes the wind like three, two, one. Boom, there it is. Now look at the fire. Ah, the southern end really blows up. This wind that came in from the north all of a sudden triggered the fire on the southern edge to grow a lot more stronger. And unfortunately, that's where the firefighters were. That wind came from a thunderstorm. It's not shown here. It's a little outside of this model domain. So the ability to predict or not predict that thunderstorm and its outflow was really the difference in predicting or not predicting that fire. How do we predict the weather in this model? Well, we do it the way we predict weather in a lot of situations. We take from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the same data from the weather models that the National Weather Service uses. And we take a subset of those data, just the part that's over Colorado and actually just a little bit beyond. And we use that as the starting point for then launching our own weather model on a finer scale on these little patches in the red boxes here on the right. And we can set up these little, what are called, domains anywhere we want, depending on where we want to simulate a fire. And these domains are pretty small, about 13 by 13 kilometers. And this is a picture of what a fire might look like in that domain. So we can simulate the weather this way over these small areas, which allows us to do it at a high resolution and still get an answer back quickly. Then within those domains, we simulate the fire. And these are short forecasts, six or 18 hours, and we simulated a number of things. We have to define where the fire is, what its edge is. It's called a fire perimeter here. And then we predict how fast it spreads and how quickly it burns through the fuel that it's moving through. Then the fire part of the computer model feeds back to the atmospheric part, heat, water vapor, and smoke. This is some of what our simulated fires burn through. These are various landscapes, all of which have different kind of burning characteristics, different kind of fuels on them, everything from a really developed urban area to nothing but sand, to lake, trees of all kinds. And you've got to know what is on Earth's surface to know what to tell your model to do the simulated burn of, because these things burn at different rates. They produce all sorts of different levels of heat. And so we're able to do that in 40 different categories. Then when a simulation is done, users like firefighters can look at a variety of different products. They're kind of classified into three general groups. There are fire products like where is the fire? How hot is it? How fast is it moving? What kind of smoke is it producing? Those are the fire products. There are weather products very similar to what any weather forecast would deliver, temperature, wind, humidity, that sort of thing. We've got a few aviation products because as you all know, a lot of firefighting involves aircraft. So does surveillance, understanding where the fire is. Aircraft can be big tankers. It can also be small unmanned aircraft that are used. So all these products are available. One thing in particular that we do that I think is pretty innovative is we simulate the likelihood of spot fires. What do I mean by that? Well, if you get a really vigorous fire, it can generate embers. Think about the campfire. Again, these little embers that come up, my land in your lap, my land on the tent, I don't know. These embers can travel tens of kilometers downwind, some extreme cases, and touch off spot fires. They look like this. Here's a forest fire, or here's a firefighter in California, the Delta Fire in 2018. And you see all these embers, some of which have actually generated spot fires to the right of this firefighter. Thanks to Noah Berger who provided this just very dramatic example. So our model can produce simulations of that. Yeah, Tim. We did have a question, and I think your expertise is leaking through. One of our students wanted to know, do you study just wildfires? No, I don't. In fact, that's not even what I study mostly. The wildfire thing is one of several things I do. I also do a little bit of studying hurricanes. I study downslope windstorms. The best way to summarize what I do is if you wanna understand how the weather is affected by what we call complex terrain. That's a fancy way of saying mountains, valleys, coastlines. The lower atmosphere is affected by all these different features. That's the kind of weather that I study. And fairly small weather. I don't study global climate so much. I don't study atmospheric chemistry. I study weather that's affected by the land surface. Yeah, great question. Thank you. Finally, this model runs in the cloud on Amazon Web Services. And about the last thing I'll show you is an example of good and bad forecast. Just to lay it out on the line. This is how well we do. Here's a good forecast. This is a sort of a plan view of a simulated fire after it's burned through in an observed fire. The blue patch is the area that was burned in our simulation. This happens to be the 416 fire. Then the red patch, red-brown, sort of depends on your monitor. That was what was actually observed. We consider this a pretty good forecast because of several things. One is the overall direction the fire moved to the Northwest. We got that simulated correctly. And firefighters need to know that. That's like the first thing they wanted to know. Where is the fire moving? We also did a pretty good job with where the fire burned. And that, you can see that by the overlaps. The area of red and blue that overlap, we got that right. And also, overall, the amount of area that was burned by the fire. Here's some poor simulations, just to be candid with you. In the first case, the Indian Valley fire, fire burned a much larger area than we simulated. The opposite was true then in the Silver Creek fire, much smaller. There are different reasons for this. We call them sources of error. First is the weather. If we didn't get the weather forecast right, fire's probably not going to be right. Another thing is the time and the location of ignition. Notice something very interesting. Look at this red dot right here, the Indian Valley fire. See that red dot? And this other one here, the Colorado or the 416 fire. That was where it was reported that the fire started. There's a problem though. That red dot is not even inside the burned area. So we know for a fact that a lot of the official reports of where and when a fire started, they're not right. Partly because firefighters are worried about fighting fires and not taking really good observations. And I can't blame them. They're paid to fight fire. So that makes it hard to run a good simulation if you don't even know the where and the when with a good degree of accuracy. Finally, we don't simulate fire suppression. So if firefighters get on the scene and they begin to get that fire contained, chances are the fire won't burn as large an area as we simulated because we just don't get that part right. Final quiz question, are wildfires bad? Yes, no. Sometimes some are some aren't, you know, kind of in the middle. Wow, everyone's responding with C sometimes. Ah, that's great. You have a you have a bright crowd. Sometimes exactly right. The fact is wildfires are natural and they're inevitable. We couldn't stop all of them even if we wanted to. And we shouldn't even try because that would be a really bad idea. They're an important part of many ecosystems around the world. We don't really understand them all that well. The fact is they're out there. They will always be out there and they do a lot of good. What we have to do is learn to live with wildfires and manage some of their most damaging effects, which you can do if you can predict them well. So thank you very much for your attention and interest in this topic. I appreciate it. Looks like we have a minute for questions here. And I know we did. We were taking, we got one question in the chat and oh, we have another one. Let's see. So again, same person. You mentioned earlier that we have more than 50,000 wildfires in one year. What states have the most wildfires out of all 50? Also, what is your favorite state you've been to? The second one is easier to answer because there's no single answer. You know, Colorado is up there on my list, but it all depends on the time of year and what you want to do. Here is my philosophy. There is something great about every place and there's beauty in everything. You just have to be broad-minded about what you consider to be beautiful. I do a lot of photography. I can find anything to photograph. So no single answer. Colorado's high on the list though. The states with most. I looked at that recently. There are far more in the Southeast than what you would think. States like Florida and Georgia, if not right at the top, are very near the top and we don't picture that because you're like, well, I mean, we tend to think of the Intermountain West. To be honest, I'd have to look it up and you can easily look it up. You just Google, you know, wildfires by state. You'll find that the Southeast is higher on the list than you would expect. California is up there, Montana, Colorado. You need places with a lot of land with fuel and with a lot of natural triggers. Lightning is a natural trigger. So that's probably another reason for the Southeast. Well, that's great. You just answered the question that came in, Jason. Well done. There was also a question of what can we do to help prevent wildfires? There are several things that you can do. One, you can do something with your behavior and you can make sure that you don't accidentally start one. So that means if you have a campfire, make sure it's permitted and it's not against rules that might be in place at the time because conditions are really bad for wildfires in which case, no fires. But if you have one, make sure it's always out unless you're right there and you watch it and it's under your control. Don't throw anything out a car window that could light on fire, you know? At home, I make sure that if I'm using my grill and it's windy, I'm aware of what I'm grilling and whether or not any embers could escape. If you happen to live in a place that's in this wildland urban interface, you've got a nice home in the hills, for example, you can do things around your house to make it less likely that your house could be harmed by a wildfire. You can clear some of the trees out from nearby and you can pay attention to what you cover your roof with. You see a lot of houses in the mountains that have metal roofs. I used to think that was because it stood up to snow better. That might also be the case, but it protects you. When those embers come in and they land on a metal roof, they're not gonna start a fire the way they would if they landed on top of a shake shingle, for example, or a more traditional asphalt shingle. Also, embers can be sucked into the vents in your house, believe it or not, like the soffit vents. So you can, it's code in some areas, you can actually put screens on there that will prevent small hot embers from being drawn into your house during a fire. And there are many other things that you can do as well. There's some great online resources. If you just Google like how to prevent wildfires or how to protect a home from a fire, there's no end of stuff that you can do. Wow, well, thank you, Jason. This has been really, really, really informative and fun to hear about your work. And thanks to you and for all the people who joined us today. And that's the Meet the Experts. We are doing this every Thursday. So look to our webpage. I'll put the link into our chat here for our next Meet the Experts, which will be on April 11th. And look to the webpage for more details about that. But yes, everybody, if you wouldn't mind, you'd like to say thank you to our presenter today. Jason, you can put that in the chat and I'll say it straight up. Thank you so much for being here. And with that, we are going to end today. Thank you, Jason. It's my pleasure, Tim. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.