The Alaska Reference Database originated as the standalone Alaska Fire Effects Reference Database, a ProCite reference database maintained by former BLM-Alaska Fire Service Fire Ecologist Randi Jandt. It was expanded under a Joint Fire Science Program grant for the FIREHouse project (The Northwest and Alaska Fire Research Clearinghouse). It is now maintained by the Alaska Fire Science Consortium and FRAMES, and is hosted through the FRAMES Resource Catalog. The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.
Type
Topic
Year
Displaying 1 - 25 of 83
Alexander, Cruz
We have devised a rule of thumb for obtaining a first approximation of a fire’s spread rate that wildland fire operations personnel may find valuable in certain situations. It is based on the premise that under certain conditions wind speed is the dominant factor in determining…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Assessing risk in a postfire landscape: are currently available tools good for the local land owner?
Wildfires and events that follow such as flooding and erosion are natural disturbances in many ecosystems. However, when these types of postfire events threaten life, property, and resources they become a concern for resource managers, communities, and private landowners. A…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Wickham, Vose, Peterson
The Nation’s authoritative assessment of climate impacts, the Fourth National Climate Assessment Vol. II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States (NCA4 Vol. II) was released in November 2018. This presentation will address the impacts of climate change on land cover…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES
CMATs work closely with incident management teams, Forest Service or other land management agencies, community residents and leaders to identify mitigation opportunities before a wildfire impacts the community. CMATs work with local partners to identify and help them resolve…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES
Wagenbrenner, Forthofer, Page, Butler
An open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver has been incorporated into the WindNinja modeling framework. WindNinja is widely used by wildland fire managers, as well as researchers and practitioners in other fields, such as wind energy, wind erosion, and search and…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Leach
This seminar is part of the USFS Missoula Fire Lab Seminar Series.
The National Weather Service (NWS) Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) has been developed to provide a national standard Analysis of Record (AoR) for large scale verification and bias-correction efforts. The RTMA…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES
Powers, Bresch, Schwartz, Coen, Sobash
Abrupt changes in wind direction and speed can dramatically impact wildfire development and spread. Most importantly, such changes can pose significant problems to firefighting efforts and have resulted in a number of fire fatalities over the years. Frequent causes of such wind…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Blunck, Butler, Bailey, Wagenbrenner
Spot fires caused by lofted embers (i.e., firebrands) can be a significant factor in the spread of wildland fires. Embers can be especially dangerous near the wildland urban interface (WUI) because of the potential for the fire to be spread near or among structures. Many studies…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Belval, Wei, Bevers
Wildland firefighting requires managers to make decisions in complex decision environments that hold many uncertainties; these decisions need to be adapted dynamically over time as fire behavior evolves. Models used in firefighting decisions should also have the capability to…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Caton-Kerr, Tohidi, Gollner
During wildland fires, firebrands form once they break off of burning vegetation or structures. Many are then lofted into the fire plume where they are transported long distances ahead of the fire front, igniting new “spot” fires as they land. To date, very few studies have been…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Hedayati, Bahrani, Zhou, Quarles, Gorham
Generation of firebrands from various fuels has been well-studied in the past decade. Limited details have been released about the methodology for characterizing firebrands such as the proper sample size and the measurement process. This study focuses on (1) finding the minimum…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Takahashi
Each year, fires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI)—the place where homes and wildlands meet or intermingle—have caused significant damage to communities. To contribute to firefighter and public safety by reducing the risk of structure ignition, fire blankets for wrapping a…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Alexander
Heuristic approaches to problem solving, commonly called rules of thumb, employ practical, quick, in the moment, methods that are not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable in every situation but sufficient for most decision making situations, especially when there is…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES
Blankenship
Powerpoint talk presented by Dr. Clay Blankenship, Universities Space Research Association (USRA)/NASA Short-Term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT)
Soil moisture is a critical variable for agriculture and for predicting fire risk, and monitoring drought and water…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES
Hudson, Blunck
Spot fires caused by lofted embers (i.e. firebrands) can be a significant factor in the spread of wildfires. Embers can be especially dangerous near the wildland-urban interface (WUI) because of the potential for the fire to be spread near or on structures. This work sought to…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Ziel, Moore, Lahm
The Advanced Fire Environment Learning Unit (AFELU) will host three speakers to talk about Predictive Services comparison tools (Robert Ziel, Alaska Fire Science Consortium), predicting fire behavior in Alaska (Chris Moore, Alaska Fire Service), and smoke tools (Pete Lahm, US…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES
Overall, drought conditions had improved across the Southern Area Geographic Area over the past two years. During the spring of 2015 drought conditions began establishing across Southern Appalachian mountain states and steadily spread and increased in severity through the fall…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE) - Final Report to the Joint Fire Science Program
The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) and the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) initiated the Fire and Smoke Model Experiment (FASMEE) (https://sites.google.com/firenet.gov/fasmee/) by funding Project 15-S-01-01 to identify and collect a set of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Abatzoglou, Williams, Barbero
Changes in global fire activity are influenced by a multitude of factors including land‐cover change, policies, and climatic conditions. This study uses 17 climate models to evaluate when changes in fire weather, as realized through the Fire Weather Index, emerge from the…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Monedero, Ramírez, Cardil
Accurately predicting fire spread and behaviour on the fireline, in the field, is highly important in order to prevent the loss of human life, improve the success of initial attack and better understand the potential fire behaviour, minimizing many risks for firefighters. We…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Evers, Ager, Nielsen-Pincus, Palaiologou, Bunzel
Risk management typologies and their resulting archetypes can structure the many social and biophysical drivers of community wildfire risk into a set number of strategies to build community resilience. Existing typologies omit key factors that determine the scale and mechanism…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Suzuki, Manzello
Firebrands generated from structures are known to be a source of rapid flame spread within communities in large outdoor fires, such as wildland-urban (WUI) fires, and urban fires. It is important to better understand firebrand generation mechanism to prevent structure ignitions…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Hakes, Salehizadeh, Weston-Dawkes, Gollner
The cause of the majority of structure losses in wildland-urban interface fires is ignition via firebrands, small pieces of burning material generated from burning vegetation and structures. To understand the mechanism of these losses, small-scale experiments designed to capture…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Bakhshaii, Johnson
One of the first significant developments in wildfire modeling research was to introduce heat flux as wildfire line intensity (kW·m–1). This idea could be adapted to using weather station measurements, topography, and fuel properties to estimate rate of fire spread, shape, and…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Ziel, Parkinson
The Fire Behavior Subcommittee of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group Fire Environment Committee undertook development of this poster to provide a job aid to visually and succinctly tie the fire environment components together in one place to compliment and reinforce fire…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES