T his summer has already proven to be a dangerous one in the tinder-dry forests of the southwest United States and Alaska. Winds play a critical role in fire spread, but a fire itself can modify local winds, helping it grow even more quickly. Now a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado has created one of the world's first computer models that traces the interplay over time between fire behavior and winds, pointing the way toward future models that might aid in fire prediction and management. First results from this model were published in the May 1996 issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology.
C lark specializes in using supercomputers to model small-scale atmospheric phenomena.
His work has analyzed severe thunderstorms, downslope windstorms, and the dynamics near fronts. Although forests vary in how they burn, the authors expect that their main findings will translate to a variety of settings. Most previous studies on fire and wind have assumed a straightforward relationship between large-scale winds and fire behavior. A fire's pattern of growth depends not only on large-scale winds but on the balance between those winds and a fire's heat output. Thus, the fire's spread may be more predictable.