As the number and scale of West Coast wildfires continue to increase, threatened communities are struggling to figure out what to do. High winds can shift the direction of a fire causing emergency evacuations of communities. Until now, it has been hard to predict how fires will spread.  WIFIRE, a new cyberinfrastructure system can monitor, predict, and visualize where wildfires are headed.  Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), WIFIRE is led jointly by the University of California (UC), San Diego, and the University of Maryland.

WIFIRE merges observations with computational techniques in order to monitor environmental conditions and predict where and how fast a wildfire will spread. As WIFIRE develops it will become scalable to users with different skill-levels via specialized web interfaces and broadcasted alerts to receivers before, during, and after a wildfire. The ability to take the sensor data and transmit it broadly will better enable situational awareness and responses at the local, state, and national levels.

WIFIRE collaborators include researchers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology’s (Calit2) Qualcomm Institute, and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) department at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Here is a video about WIFIRE: