 Understanding and predicting fire behavior is one of the necessary skills of every firefighter. In this module we are going to explore how the fire environment has changed over the years and talk about the many factors that influence your predictability of fire behavior. To get us started we talked to Tom Boatner who recently retired as the Chief of Fire Operations for the BLM. When I started the rules said you will attack and put out every single fire. So the build up of fuels from fire exclusion, the explosion of homes in the wildland urban interface which totally changes your tactical approach to catching a fire and climate change whatever it is whether it's global warming or we're in a multi-decadal drought or whatever the hell you want to call it the fire seasons are longer they're hotter they're drier the fires are bigger and more intense than anything we've ever seen in this country year in and year out. You know the other really interesting thing is young firefighters right now if you started firefighting in 1998 you've amassed an amount of fire experience that in my days would have taken 20 years. So the young firefighters and fire line leaders today are amassing a scale of experience that's beyond anything that any of their predecessors have ever seen in America. That's a pretty amazing thing to think about. Amassing the experience that Tom's talking about has not come without a cost to the fire community. Since the year 2000 we have seen 415 firefighters either entrapped or burned over on wildfires. 184 of those individuals deployed fire shelters. In every case the firefighters were surprised by unexpected fire behavior. The actual fire behavior was more intense than what they anticipated. Predicting fire behavior is no easy task yet an accurate prediction is essential when firefighters are formulating tactical plans and assessing the effectiveness of escape routes and safety zones. People that have dedicated their careers to fire behavior will be the first to tell you how difficult it is to predict. We talked to Brett Butler a fire scientist at the Missoula Fire Lab. Listen as he talks about where our fire prediction models came from and how important it is to know their limitations. Fire is fascinating we love everybody loves to stare at the flames right. It is fascinating from a technical standpoint it's the most complicated thing I could think of to study. Uncontrolled fire in an open environment with very winds and vegetation and slope. I mean that's just a technically complex problem. The fire models we use today are what we term empirical which means they're just based on experiments. For instance the model that's used in Behave Plus, Far Side, Flem Map, all of the tools, the fire modeling tools that are used operationally. It's amazing but it's based on just a set of 30 or 40 experiments in wood shavings inside the laboratory. And it's a very small bed maybe this wide and 20 feet long and they burn those little fuel beds under different conditions wind speed, fuel moisture, relative humidity and then fit a line to those points on that graph and said well here's what fire does as a function of wind speed and fuel moisture and fuel size and that's our fire model. And as a scientist I'm amazed at how well the fire models do. I mean it's amazing how accurate they are for what we're using them for right now but there's no doubt that the fire behavior especially on the high end of intensity that it's way beyond what the range of experiments that these models are based on ever covered. So understanding the limitations of these models is important of course when we think about well how much can we trust the outputs, right? How much can we trust those predictions? And much of our research today is focused on how can we improve the models we have but also develop new models. I think it's incumbent on everybody to take advantage of the tools we have, learn as much as we can about fire, learn how to use the tools we have and learn the limitations of those tools. Shouldn't be using this simple fire model to predict high intensity crown fire behavior. Even the crown fire model we have, Dick Rothamill's crown fire model is based on only six or eight fires. So you know there's a lot of other conditions out there we need to be looking at. Because the accuracy of fire behavior predictions is so important to the safety of firefighters it is important to review the fundamental principles of fire science. The behavior in which the fire burns is dependent on three major environmental factors, fuel, weather and topography. The difficulty in predicting fire behavior is obvious when you consider the variables associated with each of these three factors and the fact that these variables are constantly changing. Fuels, for example, affect fire behavior with its varying fuel moisture, fuel load and fuel type. Weather affects fire behavior through wind, relative humidity and temperature. Topography affects fire behavior through slope and aspect. Fire behavior depends on the interaction between the multiple variations of all three of these variables. There are a lot of tools and resources available to firefighters to help them assess these various factors. Let's start with fuels. Although nothing should replace onsite inspections of your local fuel conditions, there is national and geographical information available that can give you a broad picture of where high fire potential exists. Robin Heffernan and Tom Wardell work for Predictive Services at the National Interagency Fire Center. Predictive Services takes into account really three pieces of information when we produce our products and services and that is weather information, fuels information and resources information. And we take that information, we collect it, we put it together and analyze it and we provide products and services on a daily basis, daily forecast, weekly forecast out through the monthly time period and seasonal forecast as well. Well, even though our products are really designed for resource allocation support, they've tried to be tailored, we've tried to tailor those for the individual firefighter so they're useful to them as well. So I'd certainly encourage firefighters to visit our website and get familiar with the products and learn how to navigate to the various geographic areas and find information that's pertinent to them. For weather information, we generally turn to the National Weather Service. Colleen Decker functions on wildfires as an incident meteorologist. In order to be able to do my job well as an incident meteorologist, I need data. I'm data starved. Now, you'd think that I have so much information coming in that I don't need anymore, but what I need is site-specific on the ground from the firefighter data that you're seeing from day to day, hour to hour. And if I get better information from you, your forecast is going to be better. On the flip side, if I get garbage in, it's going to be garbage out. So we're working together as a team. I'm feeding that information to the fire behavior analyst and his behavior forecast is going to be better as a result. To ensure that we are dealing with good data, we'll talk a little more about taking good weather observations later. But for now, it's important to know that weather forecasts can range from a very broad forecast covering a large geographic area to a very specific spot weather forecast. The general forecast that's issued by the National Weather Service Office is a zone-average forecast that could cover several zones. So the limitations of that are that it is averaged over elevation and over geography. It covers many, many thousands of drainages. And in a general sense, it will tell you what the trends are from one day to the next or from one burning period to the next. So you can use that as sort of your big picture. However, if you're going out on initial attack, you're going to need a spot weather forecast that's site-specific for that latitude and longitude. It's imperative that initial attack gets a spot weather forecast because if they're just taking all of their decisions based on a general weather forecast from the zone average, that could be covering many, many miles over districts. And to get a spot weather forecast, that's almost as good as an IMET being right next to you on scene. These days we use a lot of different technology. We've got the Google Earth that we look at your terrain. We're looking and studying the maps and the different drainages. We have more data at our disposal than ever before. That spot weather forecast is designed just for you and for your drainage and your fuels that you're working in. So in order to establish your tactics and your strategies, you really need to get the most current forecast that you can that FWF, the general forecast, might be several hours old and there may be updates to that. So the spot weather forecast is within a half hour of what you really need once you're on the ground. In today's fire environment, it may seem as though you hear about a red flag warning virtually every day. The danger of this, of course, is that if you operate under red flag warnings too often, you may disconcern yourself with the warning altogether and the warning loses its intended effect on your tactical decision-making. Colleen will now explain why we need to know what criteria is being set for a red flag warning and for what area that warning pertains to. I've heard so many people say, how come it seems like there's a red flag warning every single day? Well, there might be a red flag warning every day for different areas in the country based on different criteria that's been established between the weather office and the land management agencies. So if you hear there's a red flag warning and you turn off your radio, you don't know if it's for your incident, for your district, or for the district that's overlapping with their radio coverage. So what you really need to do is be heads up. During the briefing, your IMET or your incident meteorologist will tell you if you have a red flag warning for your incident. That should be discerned between whether it's for the incident or whether it's for the forest or the district that they're on. To make a good fire behavior forecast on a fire, you have to take the most accurate information you have about the fuels and an accurate weather forecast and tie that into the terrain that you're interested in. Tyler Doggett does this as a Boise smoke jumper and as a qualified fire behavior analyst. You know, as the F-band, you know, I gather the fuels information, weather information, try to get a look at the topography, get as, you know, a look as much of the fire as I can, and then put together the forecast based on all that historical data, the on the ground data, my experience, and then what the behave outputs were to put together a forecast for the next morning. And basically that's it. Wash your rinse, repeat. For a firefighter to help out an F-band, probably one of the best ways is to provide feedback. You know, they're there, they're with it all the time, they see the fire behavior, they read the forecast, let them know if it's wrong, if it's off. And asking, you know, what did you base us on? You know, where'd your weather come from? Do we have an IMED on the fire? Was it, you know, a weather center that was 150 miles away using a general forecast? Because, you know, the fire behavior forecast is all built off that weather forecast. And that is the information that, you know, if you have bad weather data coming in or generalized weather data coming in, then the fire behavior outputs are going to be generalized. A lot of firefighters just, you know, they don't give an F-band time of day, typically. And I think a lot of it has to be with, you know, historical, the F-bands were in the year, crunching numbers, didn't see the fire. And having that, the thing that's paramount to be a good fire behavior analyst is you've got to be, to me, in my mind, you need to be an experienced firefighter and out on the ground, because that's the real-life data. You can model till the cows come home, but unless you get that, you know, that ground experience and observe it and feedback from the firefighters, which is so critical to validate, you know, my forecast, because I want to provide them the best information I possibly can, and without that, you know, that's kind of the most important part, feedback. Talk to me. Accurate fire behavior forecasts start with the taking of accurate weather observations. John Saltenberger from the NWCG Fire Behavior Committee has written up an article to help firefighters ensure that observations they are taking are as accurate as possible. Part of that article is in your student workbook, and you can find the entire article by visiting the Wolfstar website.