Mapping the Los Alamos Fire Author: Tim Walsh PO Box 518 Phone: 415-499-4239
Prior to this assignment, the author has mapped fires from the buttes surrounding Chico to the deserts of Southern California. After several successful mapping missions last fire season, confidence was running high. The phone rang with a dispatch to New Mexico and the confidence ran out! How do we travel across the Nation without data, equipment, or basic geographic knowledge of an area? After 9 days averaging 20 hours each, numerous maps were created. Maps were used for operational briefings, fire behavior, and public information over the Internet. The final assignment was to create a FARSITE fire behavior model to predict fire behavior for another significant wind event. Once the model was created, computers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory were used to run them. |