Planning: FIRE-PLAN: Planning Megafire Research Across Scales and Disciplines

Wildfires are a growing hazard in the United States and around the world as population growth, land-use practices, and climate change all contribute to a heightened level of risk. The most extreme wildfires are known as Megafires. Megafires devastate a large area and push through the resiliency thresholds of most ecosystems, communities, and societies.

Megafires leave little time for safe civilian evacuation and expose continental scale areas to hazardous levels of smoke for days to weeks. This award will bring together individuals representing research, health, emergency management, and fire professionals in a series of three workshops to define the highest priority wildfire research that will result in improvements to public safety, human health, and economic security.

Three workshops, two to be held in San Jose, California and the other in Worchester, Massachusetts, will bring together 30-40 interdisciplinary participants from communities such as meteorology, engineering, fire safety, community resilience, and human health. A moderator/facilitator with team-science training will help lead productive and inclusive discussions over the two-day workshops. The themes of the workshops are:

Workshop 1: Measuring Megafires for extreme fire behavior research. Workshop 2: Community Scale Resilience to Extreme Fire – New Tools and Needed Data. Workshop 3: Develop the requirements for a National Model Prediction Test Bed.

The initial products from the workshops will include three published whitepapers on: (1) designing a comprehensive field campaign to monitor and observe Megafire processes across scales of time, length, and energy; (2) developing a roadmap to provide tools to support community-scale resilience by leveraging what is known about differential community needs during a wildfire event as well as the limitations of data and models from participant expertise, and (3) developing the requirements for a National Model Prediction Test Bed on Megafires that includes end-user needs and perspectives.

This award is being co-funded across various programs at NSF, including: Physical and Dynamic Meteorology in GEO/AGS, Combustion and Fire Systems in ENG/CBET, Engineering for Civil Infrastructure and Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment in ENG/CMMI, and Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences in SBE/BCS.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.