Date: Tuesday, February 7th, 2023

Title: Unraveling the Complexity of Wildland Urban Interface Fires

Speaker: Hussam Mahmoud, George T. Abell Professor in Infrastructure at Colorado State University

Abstract: With the advent of climate change, all regions across the globe are experiencing sporadic growth in wildfire events that are expected to further increase in the future. The increasing urban development at the fringes of native ecosystems, also referred to as the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) regions, is expected to significantly increase wildfire exposure. To better prepare communities for future wildfire events, an understanding of the efficacy of current fire mitigation policies is required. The development and evaluation of such policies necessitate the use of tools that can determine the spatial distribution of wildfire damage at a community scale. Current wildfire spread models focus primarily on the wildland. Moreover, existing community level models pertain to localized areas of communities due to their computational demand. In this presentation, a new community level wildfire model will be discussed and the application of the model to predicting damage during recent wildfire events will be demonstrated. The presentation will conclude with how the new model can be used to establish effective policies towards adapting communities to wildfire events.

Biography: Hussam Mahmoud is the George T. Abell Professor in Infrastructure in the Department of Civil Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU). He obtained his BSc and MSc in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). Prior to arriving at CSU, he was the manager of the NEES Earthquake Laboratory at the UIUC and a research scientist at Lehigh University. Dr. Mahmoud’s research focuses on sustainable and resilient infrastructure and communities under different extreme events. His work has received various media coverage through citations and interviews in numerous venues, including Nature Climate Change, The U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Smithsonian Magazine, and CNN.