New Harvard app identifies wildfire hotspots with biggest risk of smoke impacts
The app is able to identify not just where blazes are likely to burn, but also where their public health impacts could be most profound, as detailed in a new study, published on Monday in Environmental Science & Technology.
'We want to know not just where catastrophic fires are likely to occur, but which fires will generate the most smoke, and affect the most people downwind,' senior author Loretta Mickley, a senior research fellow in chemistry-climate interactions at Harvard University, said in a statement.
Gaining that knowledge is critical, given the number of people who die prematurely from wildfire smoke inhalation in the U.S. West, Mickley explained.
This trend, she added, has persisted despite decades of progress made in curbing air pollution on the coasts.
To help address this gap, Mickley and her colleagues developed a Google Earth Engine App call SMRT-Flames, which enables fire managers and policymakers to evaluate potential fire-related smoke exposure risks in a given region and refine prevention strategies accordingly.
While the app currently focuses on Northern California, the researchers said that it can be expanded to include other areas.
Within that specific region, however, the scientists used their app to determine that in the 2020 fire season, targeted land management in the 15 highest-risk zones — about 3.5 percent of the area — could have decreased smoke exposures by as much as 17.6 percent.
They also calculated that following the season, about 36,400 people died from complications connected to inhaling the fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) found in smoke. These particles, the authors explained, disproportionately impact vulnerable individuals, including those with asthma and heart conditions, as well as the elderly.
The data available via SMRT-Flames could policymakers plan where management strategies, such as prescribed burns, could be most effective — and thereby reduce smoke-related health impacts over broad areas, according to the study.
'You can consider hypothetical scenarios and plan prescribed fires to reduce smoke exposure over an entire region, not just the immediate area where that prescribed fire is happening,' co-author Tianjia Liu, now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, said in a statement.
The practice of kindling controlled burns, as opposed to preventing them, has become increasingly essential to staving off larger and more catastrophic fire events from blazing through areas in the future, the researchers noted.
'This idea of wildfires being out of control is due to a combination of factors, including climate,' co-author Makoto Kelp, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, said in a statement.
But Kelp also pointed to a problematic history 'of fire suppression where we've actively prevented fires for the last 100 years, which has led to this huge buildup of fuels.'
As also shown in another study on prescribed burns last week, the researchers observed that prescribed burns are not quite as effective in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) — the area where homes meet wild vegetation — than outside, in the more highly forested areas.
And yet, the WUI spots also come with a higher risk of smoke exposure, the authors of the current study warned. With that in mind, they explained that the SMRT-Flames app can also integrate additional on-the-ground information and other types of fuel treatment plans.
'Increasing smoke exposure from wildfires in the western US underscores the urgency of optimizing land management to account for longer-term health impacts,' the authors concluded.
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