PREEVENTS Track 1: Fire Prediction Across Scales Conference at Columbia University

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Fire is a natural ecological process, a land use tool, a destructive force, and an important source of trace gas and aerosol emissions to the atmosphere. Realistic models of fire activity and behavior are necessary for operational fire management, and to understand past and future changes in fire activity. Developing such models, however, requires taking into account vegetation cover, land use practices, fire management capacity, extreme weather, and climate variability, which represent a broad range of temporal and spatial scales. This meeting will provide a forum for researchers working across these scales to interact. The objectives are to summarize the state of the art in fire modeling and prediction, identify areas where significant progress can be made in the next 10 years, and to connect researchers with fire management practitioners.The expectation is that decision makers will be provided with an understanding of how well fire can be predicted for the purposes of protecting life and property and maintaining healthy ecosystems, at present and in the future. For the purposes of this conference, decision makers range from operational fire managers needing to predict the behavior of a single wildfire, to health professionals needing to understand possible smoke impacts, to policy-level planners trying to understand how much fire there should be on the landscape. The broad impact of this conference will be to establish a baseline for these stakeholders to understand how well fire activity and its consequences can currently be quantitatively simulated and how this can be improved in the next 10 years.