Evaluation of Fire Forecast Products to Enhance U.S. Drought Preparedness and Response
| Project: |
Evaluation of Fire Forecast Products to Enhance U.S. Drought Preparedness and Response |
| Partners: |
University of Arizona, CLIMAS; University of California San Diego, CAP; Neptune and Company, Inc.; University of Alaska Fairbanks, ACCAP |
| Primary Scientists: |
Dan Ferguson (University of Arizona, CLIMAS); Timothy Brown (Desert
Research Institute, Western Regional Climate Center, CAP); Paul Duffy (Neptune and Company, Inc.,
ACCAP); Gigi Owen (University of Arizona, CLIMAS); Sarah Trainor (University of Alaska, ACCAP) |
Project Description
Evaluation of Fire Forecast Products to Enhance U.S. Drought Preparedness and Response
As the scientific community clarifies its understanding of how climate and wildfire interact, an increasing amount of effort and resources are being spent to deliver this science to the US wildfire community. One model that has shown great promise consists of the National Seasonal Assessment workshops (NSAW, click here for the 2009 report) and the Significant Fire Potential Outlooks produced during these annual workshops and monthly conference calls. However, it is not well documented who uses these outlooks, how they use them, or if the outlooks provide any economic benefit. This cross-RISA (CLIMAS, CAP, ACCAP) drought project will assess the impact the NSAW seasonal and monthly fire outlooks have on decision makers across the agencies who collaborate to plan for and manage wildfires in the Western U.S. This project will evaluate who is using these outlooks and how they are being used in order to: 1) provide immediate (next year)
input into the production and distribution of these products and 2) begin to build a seasonal fire decision
analysis framework to help identify where additional resources are most efficiently spent by better
understanding and quantifying uncertainties in current decision making. The project team will use social network analysis (SNA) and semi-structured interviews to evaluate the
impact of the NSAW outlooks on decision making at the national level and at the Southwest and Alaskan
regional levels. SNA includes various tools and methods to study the patterns of relations between actors
and groups in a network, which will help us to:
a) Identify a network of people who use the seasonal and monthly outlooks. By interviewing the people
in this network, we will understand how the outlooks are used in decision making and how the
outlooks could better suit their needs.
b) Identify how fire and drought related information is processed, interpreted, and disseminated within
the network. This information will be used to improve the fire outlooks for subsequent fire seasons.
c) Identify unconnected networks working on fire and drought-related themes. We may discover
networks whose members are working on similar issues, but are not yet connected to one another due
to some kind of barrier (e.g., communication, geographic, hierarchical).
d) Promote innovation through communication with other drought-related networks. Connecting these
networks with one another could lead to new products, processes or initiatives regarding national
drought/fire policy or local drought/fire management.
Our goal is to better understand not only the context for these decisions, but also where the key
uncertainties in decision-making reside so that we can begin to construct a decision framework to identify
optimal fire management activities for use by National Interagency Coordination Center and Predictive
Service units across the U.S. While we will be focusing our local investigations in the Southwest and
Alaska this process and our findings can be applied to other Geographic Area Coordination Centers
across the U.S., as well as to NIDIS programs that seek to understand flows of information and decision
contexts for applying climate information to decision making.
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