NSF-funded Project to Focus on Wildfire Predictions and Simulations.

SDSC, along with two other research organizations at UC San Diego, were awarded a multi-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to build an end-to-end cyberinfrastructure to perform real-time data-driven assessment, simulation, prediction, and visualization of wildfire behavior. The project, called WIFIRE, was funded under a three-year grant worth approximately $2.65 million. Aside from SDSC, participants include researchers the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology’s (Calit2) Qualcomm Institute, and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) department at the university’s Jacobs School of Engineering. Also participating in the project is the University of Maryland’s Department of Fire Protection Engineering.  The system integrates networked observations such as heterogeneous satellite data and real-time remote sensor data, with computational techniques in signal processing, visualization, modeling, and data assimilation to provide a scalable method to monitor such phenomena as weather patterns that can help predict a wildfire’s rate of spread.