Description:

The United States is entering a new era of increasing wildfire frequency, size, and intensity. Fire behavior is becoming more extreme, with fires becoming large enough and hot enough to create their own weather. This is occurring in a landscape which is becoming more fire prone due to climate change and population growth near the Wildland-Urban Interface. Thus, there is a growing need for high-resolution weather, fire behavior, and smoke information to inform management decisions at the mitigation, preparedness, and response phases of the natural disaster life cycle. To support the development of and applications for the next generation of coupled wildfire-weather models, this session welcomes abstracts on all topics in the realm of coupled modeling of wildfire. Example modeling topics include fuel modeling, fire spread modeling, smoke emission modeling, smoke transport modeling, heat exchanges between the surface fire and atmosphere, plume rise processes, atmospheric response to fire-induced heating, and smoke impacts on meteorology. Contributions from Open Source and Community Modeling development efforts are especially welcome. High-resolution wildfire data assimilation topics are also welcome, such as initialization of fires from satellite and airborne observations and fuel moisture assimilation. This session also encourages abstracts on applications of coupled fire modeling to demonstrate potential improvements to decision making. This includes the visualization and information delivery systems needed to support such applications. It also includes case studies that illustrate current gaps in modeling and observation systems. Examples from prescribed burns, wildland fires, and urban fires are all of interest to this session.