Where There’s Smoke

Science and Technology @ UCSB

The close juxtaposition of the ocean and the mountains in Santa Barbara makes for beautiful views — but when it comes to wildfires, it can also spell danger. In the past decade, the area has experienced seven major fires on both sides of the Santa Ynez Mountains, including the Whittier fire that started July 8.In fact, say UC Santa Barbara researchers, the region epitomizes one of the worst wildfire hazard scenarios affecting a highly populated area along the West Coast of the United States. A significant portion of the city’s population resides in mountain areas near canyons and passes, making them particularly vulnerable to fires during extreme weather conditions such as rapid warming and decreased relative humidity. The accompaniment of frequent gusty downslope winds called sundowners are known to exacerbate wildfires.
To evaluate urban wildfire patterns and resilience strategies, a group from UCSB’s Earth Research Institute (ERI) and Department of Geography has recently been awarded a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant.
“The project’s main goals are to improve existing fire-weather forecast methods, increase resilience and reduce the socioeconomic impact of wildfires,” explained principal investigator (PI) and ERI researcher Leila Carvalho, a professor in UCSB’s Department of Geography. “We will integrate atmospheric, fire-spread and transportation models to enhance the current understanding of extreme fire weather regimes and wildfire behavior in the wildland-urban interface.”
Co-PI Charles Jones has been studying regional climate for nearly two decades. “We know the basic mechanism of the sundowner winds, but they are heavily influenced by topography,” said Jones, a UCSB geography professor and an ERI researcher. “Sometimes you have sundowner winds in Santa Barbara but not in Refugio up the coast, and vice versa. We want to understand these spatial variabilities in high resolution and use what we learn to run fire models and develop statistics of high-potential fire spread.”
Transportation modeling in ...

Read More