Utilization of GIS for Extreme Winds and Fire Risk Modeling

In southern California, extreme winds rapidly spread wildfires toward highly populated regions. Until recently, the spatiotemporal characteristics of these winds was unknown, and no studies had attempted to reconstruct significant wildfires influenced by these wind events. GIS applications provide usefulness in not only the visualization and analyzation of the meteorological and geographical data, but also in the creation of fire ignition methods and wildfire risk maps. In this presentation, the utility of visualizing meteorological variables, such as wind speed and direction, as well as the relation of past fires to cities in areas with complex topography is demonstrated. Additionally, the procedure to run an operationally-used wildfire spread model is shown. Finally, the methods used to model wildfire ignitions and create risk maps are presented.

Presenter: Dr. Katelyn Zigner recently defended her PhD dissertation in Geography at UCSB. In her dissertation titled “Extreme Winds in Association with Wildfire Spread and Risk in Coastal Santa Barbara, CA,” she studied strong, downslope winds and the fires that rapidly spread toward populous regions as a result. She is currently a Pathways Student Intern at the NWS MDL, utilizing her programming, visualization, and interdisciplinary skills to examine visibility from model and observational datasets. Her research interests and expertise are in mountain meteorology, extreme events, climatology, fire weather, and wildfire modeling. Furthermore, she has skills in GIS and remote sensing, and have programming knowledge in bash, IDL, Python, FORTRAN, and some R. She has experience working with large datasets and many data formats.

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