WIRC Fire Modeling Group
The Wildfire Interdisciplinary Reserch Center fire modeling group led by Dr. Kochanski is dedicated to advancing our understanding of how wildfires create their own weather and impact air quality. The overarching goal of the WIRC modeling group is to improve current fire, smoke and weather forecasting capabilities by building new coupled fire-atmosphere models accounting for the fire impacts on local weather conditions and air quality.
We develop and run state-of-the-art forecasting and data assimilation systems based
on the coupled fire-atmosphere model (WRF-SFIRE) to conduct numerical experiments and provide operational support for current wildfires
and lay ground for future weather, fire spread and air quality models.
We feed supercomputers with weather data, satellite fire observations, airborne infrared fire perimeters, and fuel moisture to forecast future fire risk, fire progression, and smoke dispersion. We are a part of the Open Wildfire Modeling Group, gathering developers of open source wildfire models helping solve local and global wildfire problems.
We believe that using state-of-the-art fire models should be easy. We work easy to
use web-based solutions assisting in wildfire forecasting and prescribed burns. Numerical
forecasts initiated from a web controller, are executed on a supercomputer, and uploaded
to a webserver where they are accessible from any device with an internet connection and a browser.
Meet the WIRC Fire Modeling Team:
