Speaker: Tina Liu, University of British Columbia

Abstract:
Record-breaking fire seasons in North America, such as in 2020, 2021, and 2023, included dozens of megafires that lasted for weeks with periods of explosive growth. Improving the monitoring and predictive modeling of extreme fire spread are important tasks for protecting communities and allocating firefighting resources. To this end, we developed the GOES-Observed Fire Event Representation (GOFER) algorithm to map the fire progression of large wildfires with hourly fire perimeters, active fire lines, and fire spread rates. Using GOES-East and GOES-West geostationary satellite detections of active fires, we tested the GOFER algorithm on 28 large wildfires over 50,000 acres in California from 2019-2021. In contrast to algorithms using low-earth-orbit satellites with limited overpasses, GOFER fills in temporal gaps during extreme fire growth periods, when fires cause the most stress on suppression efforts and are most disruptive to affected communities. We then synchronize GOFER with weather, topography, fuels, and suppression resources deployed to build data tables and data cubes for our current applications, such as predicting fire growth and untangling the influence of its drivers. First, we find that active fire lines, defined as the intersection of the fire perimeter and active fire detections, are a key control on fire growth in preliminary prediction models. Second, we are leveraging interagency reports to investigate, and ultimately quantify, the role of suppression efforts on modulating fire spread and resource limitations during severe fire seasons. In future work, we will expand the GOFER algorithm to fires across North and South America and build spatially-explicit models for predicting fire spread and testing the efficacy of fire management strategies.

Speaker Bio:
Tianjia (Tina) Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Tina was a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine; she completed her Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and B.A. in Environmental Science at Columbia University. Tina is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist who uses a combination of remote sensing, GIS, data science, and atmospheric modeling to understand modern human-fire relationships, the role of fire in the Earth system, and the impacts of extreme events on planetary health. Broadly, her research lies at the intersection of atmospheric science, geography, and public health, with special focus on India, Equatorial Asia, and North America.