NORMAN, Okla. – When U.S. citizens are faced with the threat of tornadoes or hurricanes, a unified system issues short-term warnings. But nationally, individuals facing wildfire threats have no such system to rely on. A team of researchers, led by Joe Ripberger from the University of Oklahoma, is looking to change that, and a recent grant from the National Science Foundation will fund their groundbreaking work.
Current warning systems for wildfires and wildfire conditions vary from location to location. Red flag warnings are issued a day or two in advance to highlight areas where conditions are ripe for wildfires, but these warnings are relatively large, sometimes the size of a full state or region.
“When you think about a warning like a tornado warning, you think about something in a very small spatial area, about the size of a county or a city, and you know that a tornado is likely to come in the next 20 to 30 minutes. We don’t have a nationwide system like that for wildfires right now,” said Ripberger, deputy director for research at the Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (IPPRA), the lead principal investigator on the grant.
This is not the first time Ripberger has done research on weather warning systems. He and his colleagues have studied warnings for tornadoes, hurricanes and floods.
“Those are all areas where we’ve worked really closely with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service on improving and measuring improvements to warning systems,” said Ripberger. This will be the first time they focus specifically on fire.
Over the last few years, National Weather Service offices in Oklahoma and Texas have been collaborating with state Forestry Services and local emergency managers to issue fire warnings, Ripberger said.
“While National Weather Service fire warnings can technically be issued anywhere in the country, in reality, they haven’t spread much beyond Oklahoma and Texas. One of the main goals of our NSF project is to take what we’ve been doing here, and what we’ve learned, and see how or if it can apply across the rest of the country,” said Ripberger.
The system’s potential was demonstrated during a major fire event in March of this year, when Oklahoma experienced over 100 fires across the state. Through coordinated efforts between the National Weather Service, state forestry and emergency management agencies, warnings were successfully issued for many of the fires, providing advance notice to populations in their path.
“It’s incredible the amount of coordination that was necessary to get information out there and issue those warnings, especially on a day where they had to focus throughout the state rather than on one large fire,” said Ripberger.
Fire and fire weather are different from other types of severe weather threats. A combination of atmospheric and surface conditions governs fires themselves, and surface conditions add an additional challenge to the warning system.
“You have to consider what the land surface and the fuel on the ground looks like in terms of how likely it is to burn, along with what the atmosphere is doing,” said Ripberger.
Once a fire has developed, its own existence affects the atmosphere. In some cases, fires can even generate their own weather systems, including thunderstorms and tornadoes, creating feedback loops that affect both fire behavior and atmospheric conditions.
In addition to the complications presented by fire itself, the necessity of collaboration across entities makes a fire warning system even more challenging. A tornado warning is issued by a single individual at the National Weather Service, while the developing program for fire warnings requires a great deal of communication between various offices.
Three thrusts will fuel this research. First, scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations will work to understand fire and atmospheric interactions better to develop the basic scientific knowledge necessary to issue fire warnings.
The second thrust focuses on the social and behavioral science questions of the project: what such a warning would look like, what kind of governance jurisdiction conflicts come into play in a fire situation and how people respond to fire warnings. This work will be led by researchers at IPPRA.
The third and final thrust is to build FireNet, a transdisciplinary network connecting people who study fire with practitioners such as the weather service and state and federal employees.
“Hopefully, these partners will become our champions as we work to develop a new system. If we integrate them with the research process early on, they can shape what we’re doing. They can inform and also learn, so when the project comes to an end, they can work with us to build a road map that says if we want to be in a position to have a unified fire warning system in the United States five years from now, here’s what that will require,” said Ripberger.
The project involves 11 senior researchers across four University of Oklahoma entities and its partners: IPPRA, the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory, the State Climatology Office and the Oklahoma Fire and Mesonet teams. While the three-year project won’t produce an operational warning system, it will establish the foundational science and stakeholder relationships necessary to eventually implement a unified national approach to wildfire warnings.