Wildfire Simulations for the Rest of Us

Wildfire danger ratings are a great way to know the general relative likelihood of a wildfire starting. They're also used as the basis for risk-reduction actions, such as regional fire bans. It's a useful tool, but does it provide the whole picture?

For one, danger ratings are usually not very granular. In both the US and Canada, each fire danger rating is typically calculated for an area much larger than an individual community. They take into account weather as well as fuel moisture conditions (which is one of the most important parameters that influences the likelihood of a fire starting). However, they use data from weather stations that are often not fully representative of a community's weather, especially for more isolated rural communities.

They also lack critical local information that impacts fire spread. For example, fire danger models don't take into account localized topography (Canada, US) which greatly impacts how a fire can spread.

This creates a couple of problems. First, it can be difficult to communicate the actual day-to-day risk to people. Having a constant high or extreme rating is an easily ignorable signal, and people can forget the actual danger and act unsafely. As well, it doesn't provide specific information on how a fire would spread once started.

How can you work around this?

What fire behaviour experts do when they want to understand better how fires may behave is to use special software to simulate fires. While these tools are powerful, they are also difficult to wield. For one, just getting the data required to run simulations is a chore. You also need some beefy hardware. Even after you've done all that, you still need a way to visualize the raw simulation output. However, once you accomplish all this work, you start to get a very clear picture into what a possible wildfire may actually do. Unfortunately, the resources of the agencies with the expertise are not unlimited, so communities have to rely on simple danger ratings instead of getting a full picture of their risk.

What would danger ratings look like if anybody could run fire simulations? We think it enables communities to have a more nuanced understanding of wildfire risk. This is a powerful tool in the hands of people who have a strong incentive to keep their community safe. This is why we built LensVx. Instead of needing to download all this software, find all this data, and learn all these tools, the only thing you need to do is choose where you want to simulate fires and click run.

To run your first simulation, go to lensvx.pathandfocus.com and create an account. After paying with your credit card you’ll have access to all our modelling tools.