Fire Conference

It's a lot easier to post when I'm on travel. I can't really do it at work (because I'm too busy and I shouldn't), and when I get home, I tend to focus my energies on my immediate family blog (here) or my extended family blog (here). So this one gets pushed aside.

But I'm on travel and don't have anything else to do, so I blog! This is the third business trip in a row that I haven't even turned on the television, so I tend to always have a few hours in the evening to surf the net and blog.

I'm at the Association for Fire Ecology conference in Tucson, AZ. It was very (!) nice landing in Tucson, looking out the window, and seeing some dude on the tarmac in a short-sleeved shirt. Much nicer than the long winter I've already endured back home.

This conference is focusing on fire in the Southwest. I've mapped 58 fires in the last 6 years in AZ and NM for BAER support, so I'm fairly familiar with the recent fire history. I did a poster presentation tonight for my boss (highlighting MTBS) and am giving an oral presentation tomorrow morning re: remote sensing for BAER support. It's nice that there is a whole track at this conference just devoted to BAER. I've been able to sit in on some very interesting talks.

One example is a talk given by Sue Cannon, the lead scientist on the USGS Landslide Hazard project. She's led a charge to take burn severity data, apply it to watersheds, take a plethora of weather information (rainfall intensity and duration, for example), and model areas most susceptible to debris flows. The NWS takes her data and adds it to their flash flood warning system and now, in their alerts on TV, add information like "Due to recent fire activity and heavy rainfall in Rendija Canyon, there is a severe risk of debris slides" to their scrolling marquee. Previously, they'd list only flash flood potentials, and it'd never be specific to fires.

I was very interested in this because, while these examples are focuses mainly in Southern California (see examples here), we had a very similar request from the NWS in Utah. They wanted our burn data so they could add the same kinds of information to their flash flood warnings. I was also intrigued by her talk because I have been the source of many of the burn severity data she's used in her analyses.