1Landscape-scale Wildfire Modeling and Remote Sensing

• Fire research focuses on prescribed fires and small or low intensity naturally occurring fires. – Assumption underlying the approach so far: Thorough understanding of the details of many small fires will, some time in the future, add up to understanding large, costly events. – Current methods: detailed fuel assessments, micrometeorological measurements, and detailed postfire consumption measurements • Meanwhile, there has been little direct measurement of large wildfire phenomena. • We assert: – That assumption is incorrect: Scientific studies of the environmental factors contributing to the growth of a large fires must be approached in a fundamentally different way than studies of small or low intensity fires. – Methods must be different: Measurements should be scale-appropriate & observations adaptable to the phenomena & model forecast