University of Arizona creates new tool to help fight wildfires

TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) -- Researchers at the University of Arizona are working on a tool that may help crews make decisions when battling wildfires.

When tackling a wildfire, firefighters need to juggle several factors including wind, temperatures, and humidity and they get their information from many different sources. That can take time and lead to some decision inconsistencies.

That’s one of the reasons researchers decided to streamline data on one of the most important aspects of the firefight.

The Burn Period Tracking Tool takes hourly data from a network across the southwest and gathers observations on relative humidity.

“We plot that out across the southwest and then keep track of that over the year to basically gauge short-term variations in fire weather,” said Michael Crimmins, a Professor at the Department of Environmental Science.

The data in the tool isn’t new, but getting it all in one place is.

“There wasn’t an easy, quick way to actually access this across the whole network,” added Crimmins. “So we just simply stepped in and just helped visualize this data.”

This tool is the culmination of three years of investigation into what information wildland fire managers use to make decisions. The results showed they were getting their information from many different sources, which led to some inconsistencies in decision-making.

“One of the fire managers screen-shared with us and he showed us his tabs and he had something like 40 different sources of information that he was consulting,” said Dan Ferguson, Associate Professor of Environmental Science. “Basically what he said was,I don’t use all 40 of them all the time, but I’m looking at all this stuff all the time trying to figure out which one is the best one.”

It may sound like a simple tool, but for the people who created it, it means a lot to help out.

“These managers are making decisions that affect people’s lives,” said George Frisvold, Professor at the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics. “People’s lives and property are at stake. It was a burden to them, emotionally I think, to make the right decision. So helping those folks feels good.”

K.P. Maxwell, wildland coordinator with the Tucson Fire Department, said tracking humidity is one of the most important parts of fighting a wildfire, especially with the dry conditions we’ve been seeing.

“Often at night time, we expect a recovery for that humidity to come up to maybe 30% and fire activity will go down,” he said. “But when it doesn’t recover and that humidity doesn’t come up at night time, then we can continue to have active burning through the night. So it doesn’t quite give firefighters the relief or the break that we need to get around a fire.”

Maxwell added that if he were only given one factor to monitor during a wildfire, it would be humidity because moist fuels aren’t going to burn even if they have wind on them, but if you have dry fuels without wind they will burn.

The Burn Period Tracker is already being used regionally, with the next phase more centered around implementing it locally. You can learn more about it here.

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