HBCU-Excellence in Research: Dynamics of Orographic Effects on Major Wildfires that Occurred in the Southwest United States under Diverse Mesoscale Environments

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Major wildfires are a growing natural hazard, posing a devastating threat to life and property. The 2018 wildfire season was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season on record in California, having led to over 100 fatalities and caused more than $3.5 billion in damages. There is a great deficit in our understanding of how fundamental atmospheric processes and their interactions with complex terrain and fire heat can produce a rapid spread of wildfire over downslope regions of complex terrain, such as those in the southwest U.S. As a result, it remains challenging to forecast, even a few hours in advance, the gusty, extremely dry wind surges responsible for rapid fire spread over downslope regions. New findings from the project could be used to improve the representations of the atmospheric environmental conditions for fire weather forecasts by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the National Weather Service. Improved fire weather forecasts have the potential to increase public safety and reduce loss of life and property. The research results derived from this project will enhance the contents of graduate and undergraduate courses. The project will educate and train graduate and undergraduate students at North Carolina A&T State University (NCAT), one of very few Historically Black Colleges and Universities conducting atmospheric science research. In addition, NCAT investigators plan to visit and present results to high-school teachers and students to broaden their Earth and environmental science knowledge as well as to recruit students into meteorology. A research and education network will be built up among the NCAT, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, USFS, and Argonne National Laboratory. In the research project, four historic and devastating wildfires that occurred in northern, central and southern California and central Arizona, as well as several significant fire events observed under real-world settings (major scientific field experiments), will be studied extensively. The research approach will involve simulating the complex interactions among the atmosphere, terrain, and the fire itself with state-of-art convection-permitting mesoscale computer models. For the field experiment case studies, very high-resolution sensors will provide observational data on the fire-atmosphere interactions for comparison with the model simulations. These simulation and observational techniques will enable the research team to diagnose how weather systems interact with the terrain and produce very gusty winds that in turn create a favorable environment for wildfire spread in communities on the edge of major developed regions of the southwestern U.S. The computer models allow the fire and winds to interact and will enable the study of atmospheric motions that contribute to the intensification and spread of these devastating wildfires. This will lead to better predictions of fire intensity and motion in future wildfire events.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.