Saving Lives When Wildfires Burn

Reported June 2008

UNIVERSITY PARK, Penn. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Most of us like to access the daily forecast so we know how to dress for work, school or travel. But for those who rely on the weather for their livelihoods, like emergency responders, researchers have developed a way to deliver updated and customized weather maps directly to their desktops.

Margot Kaye is a forestry expert and wildfire manager. On any given day, she needs to know wind speed and direction, precipitation and humidity. "We use that data to get a sense of how fire might behave given those weather conditions," Kaye of the the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, told Ivanhoe.

Now it's possible to take the information -- not just one or two, but several steps further -- by using geographic information systems or GIS and specialized mapping options developed by researchers at the Penn. State. "We have several maps or data sets and you can overlay them over each other," Bernd Haupt, a senior research associate at Pennsylvania State University's Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.

The GIS program allows users to take live streams of raw weather data from the national weather service and display the information on a map. Then this map can be customized, starting with satellite imagery from Google Earth. Users can layer up to seventeen different weather variables, including temperature, rainfall and wind direction and, in the case of wildfires, vertical column or surface level smoke, revealing a clearer picture of what's happening.

"It not only impacts the people who are living near the fire, but it also would impact where the firefighters would be or where they would want to locate themselves in the potential for the fire to spread," Maurie Kelly, a senior research assistant at Pennsylvania State University's Institutes for the Environment, told Ivanhoe.

New data can be added to the GIS map with the click of a button, making the latest information easily accessed on a desktop computer. Before the new customized GIS maps, Kaye would have no other options during a fire-than to search a handful of separate websites for the weather information she needed. "To be able to access all that data at once would really be useful -- make things much smoother," Kaye says. And save time, when lives could be on the line. These maps can be used for tracking weather events as well.

The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Dr. Bernd J. Haupt
Earth and Environmental Systems Institute
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802-6813
(814) 865-8188
bjhaupt@psu.edu

American Geophysical Union
Washington, DC 20009-1277
(800) 966-2481
http://www.agu.org

American Meteorological Society
Boston, MA 02108-3693
(617) 227-2425
http://www.ametsoc.org

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