Industrial engineering’s Ntaimo receives NSF grant for wildfire research
Dr. Lewis Ntaimo
Dr. Lewis Ntaimo, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University, and research collaborators at Georgia State University, University of Oklahoma and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been awarded a $1,000,000 four-year grant by the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) program for their project “Collaborative Research: CDI-Type II — Integrated Weather and Wildfire Simulation and Optimization for Wildfire Management.”
Wildfires cause great destruction including the loss of life and damage to property, infrastructure and the environment. The complexity of wildfire management arises from the uncertain dynamic interactions and dependencies among multiple system components. These include highly dynamic and nonlinear wildfire behaviors, weather conditions, and firefighting resource management.
In previous research, these components have been largely treated in isolation in their own fields. To achieve effective wildfire management, decision-making support tools that integrate all these components as a whole are needed. The objective of this project is to develop new models and computation methods that integrate weather prediction, wildfire simulation, data assimilation and stochastic optimization for effective wildfire response management.
The project makes two key paradigm-shifting advances in wildfire modeling and management: 1) coupled weather and wildfire modeling and data assimilation for two-way interactive dynamic weather-wildfire prediction, and 2) Integrated wildfire simulation and stochastic optimization for wildfire containment. The project focuses on computational thinking for understanding the complexity in the natural systems of weather and wildfire behavior, and in the man-made system of firefighting resources management.
Due to the stochastic and multiscale nature of the problem data associated with these systems, the project also involves data assimilation and parallel/distributed computational methods for robust weather and wildfire behavior predictions.
Collaborating with Ntaimo on this project are Dr. Xiaolin Hu from Georgia State University (lead), Dr. Ming Xue and Dr. Yang Hong from the University of Oklahoma, and Dr. James Nutaro of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Ntaimo’s portion of the research project will be conducted through the Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) with a funding of $220,000. Ntaimo will collaborate with the Texas Forest Service in College Station to develop new decision models for wildfire emergency response planning.
TEES is the engineering research agency of the State of Texas and a member of The Texas A&M University System.
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September 28th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Dr. Ntaimo,
Congratulations on a worthy grant!
The amount of fuel available was not listed as one of the key parameters.
GHG reduction spending for the most part is a non-return investment, certainly in the short term.
Carbon capture in wood is a very low cost solution and the wood can be used for building. Both are lost as forests burn in a wildfire.
Would it be useful to add the amount of fuel as a key parameter and identify and suggest forest management techniques that harvest the wood for beneficial use?
Removing some of the fuel would mitigate the severity of wildfires that do occur. Using the wood as long term beneficial carbon sequestration would be win-win.
Management Suggestion – put in fire breaks to contain wildfires and allow access to harvest the lumber, at least at the peripheries.
Matt Jaska, ChE ‘82