Trial by Fire: U of A-Developed Tool Cuts Through the Noise in Wildfire Management

Wildfire management is high stakes and often complex. Fire managers have to consider environmental conditions, weather forecasts and climatic trends, all while making decisions with lives and landscapes on the line. 

While scientists are capable of collecting more data than ever, sometimes less is more – particularly in emergency wildfire management. Together with wildland fire managers across the Southwest, University of Arizona researchers developed a tool that gets those on the ground what they need: clear, timely and accurate data.

The Burn Period Tracker tool began as an experimental weather monitoring web application, developed to give real-time information on the number of hours per day that relative humidity is less than or equal to 20% – a metric informally known as the "burn period."

After several years of deliberation and refinement, the tool is now used by the Southwest Coordination Center, is featured in the U.S. Forest Service Risk Management Assistance dashboard and has been widely adopted by fire managers throughout the Southwest. The project is supported by the university's Climate Assessment for the Southwest program, part of the Arizona Institute for Resilience.

Down the rabbit hole

The Burn Period Tracker was developed after researchers in the U of A College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences asked the question: What kind of information are wildland fire managers using to make decisions? That sparked a three-year investigation that included focus groups and surveys of hundreds of inter-agency wildfire managers. 

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What they found was eye-opening, said George Frisvold, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Fire managers were combining data from different sources, leading to inconsistencies in decision making. Ironically, experts were meanwhile churning out advanced tools with many bells and whistles that went unused.

One wildland fire manager told researchers: "There's just so much information and so many independently created applications or data sources that it's nearly impossible for one person to be familiar with everything and identify what's best or what suits their need or purpose at the time."

"As we started the project, we recognized that it would be useful to have the perspective of someone with a lot of experience working in fire management to help guide us toward relevant questions and connect us with the fire management community," said Dan Ferguson, an associate professor at the Department of Environmental Science. 

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That person turned out to be Chuck Maxwell, an operational fire meteorologist with the Southwest Geographic Area Coordination Center at the time.

The researchers and Maxwell spent three years meeting, analyzing and debating information. Their collaboration led to the publication of a paper identifying what drives differences in decision making. They found that the most significant variation in information use was tied to the specific agency to which the fire managers belonged.

They found fire managers in the Southwest used very few tools for weather information. During their research, the team uncovered a simple truth: Managers needed something practical, not perfect.

Building a better solution

The breakthrough happened during a meeting with the research team when Maxwell suggested, "Why don't we use a metric already being hand calculated and estimated by managers in the field? It is known as the 'burn period' and has been used by analysts for many years."

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The idea for the Burn Period Tracker tool stemmed from Maxwell's fieldwork experience, where fire behavior analysts often asked about daily relative humidity. 

With Maxwell's suggestion, Michael Crimmins, a climate science specialist with U of A Cooperative Extension, whipped up a prototype of the Burn Period Tracker in just three days. The tool's straightforward design addressed immediate needs and gave fire managers a reliable way to find information that they were already using but struggling to find.

"We dream about how fire managers think and work, and we give presentations and write a lot of papers with overly sophisticated analysis, and they just don't meet the mark," said Crimmins. "The Burn Period Tracker is the ground-up version of listening and doing what the fire managers say, and the proof is in the pudding."