PREEVENTS Track 2: Understanding Extreme Fire Weather Hazards and Improving Resilience in Coastal Santa Barbara, California

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Wildfires at the wildland-urban interface pose significant hazards to people and the environment and cost billions of dollars. Santa Barbara County in California encapsulates one of the worst wildfire hazard scenarios affecting highly populated areas along the west coast of the United States. A significant portion of the Santa Barbara population resides in mountain areas near canyons and passes in the wildland-urban interface, and are particularly vulnerable to fires during extreme weather conditions. Residents use winding narrow roads to leave these areas, which increases the time needed for mandatory evacuations. Frequent gusty downslope winds accompanied by rapid warming and decreased relative humidity are among the most significant fire weather conditions affecting coastal Santa Barbara. Such conditions have enhanced the severity of 15 major wildfires since 1955. This project will integrate atmospheric, fire spread and transportation models to enhance the current understanding of extreme fire weather regimes and wildfire behavior in the wildland-urban interface in Santa Barbara County. The main goal of the project is to improve existing fire-weather forecast methods, increase resilience, and reduce socioeconomic impacts of wildfires. The project also will improve understanding of the effects of natural hazards and extreme events on societal preparedness in the context of evacuation planning. The results of the project can be applied to many other mountain areas in Southern California where fires present a major hazard. The project will provide key outreach materials for dissemination to government agencies that could be available to the public. Moreover, the project supports the development of new educational courses, and supports the training of graduate students and a postdoctoral investigatorThis project will develop unique approaches to make substantial intellectual advances in a natural hazard problem of high impact to society. The research links fire-weather, fire behavior and evacuation planning and focuses on the coastal area of Santa Barbara County with a population of over 200,000 people. The project will develop a new framework centered on the specific objectives of: 1) understanding synoptic-to-mesoscale mechanisms of downslope windstorms and extreme fire-weather regimes (i.e., gusty winds, low humidity, high temperature and high vegetation fuels), 2) investigating probabilities of fire spread and fire-weather risk at the wildland-urban interface, 3) developing enhanced evacuation strategies using transportation and land use models and 4) carrying on a comprehensive program to transfer research findings to Federal, State and Local Agencies and the community of Santa Barbara. This research will create scenarios to examine evacuation strategies using transportation modeling, significantly enhancing understanding of extreme fire weather regimes on various spatial and temporal scales and improving the present capability to model and forecast these hazardous events.